Tragic Eikonografy

A conceptual history of Mimesis,

from Plato to T. S. Eliot

Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University

of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Eric Jean-Marie

Valti Woehrling.

August 1997
 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the British Academy for their generous award of

postgraduate resarch grant for the academic years 1993-1994 to 1995-

1996. I would also like the English Department and the Faculty of Arts of

the University of Liverpool for funding my attendance at various

academic conferences.

By way of apology for the argumentative nature of this thesis, I should

like to say that I have held, almost without exception, every point of view

which I criticise in it, at one point or another in my life. I would therefore

like to thank those people whose teaching resulted in my no longer

holding those views. I would like to thank Mr. Vincent Buxton, who

taught me English at the European School of Brussels (II), and who as

well as giving me a grounding in English which provided the foundation

for my later studies, was also extremely supportive of me at an important

time in my life. It was thanks in part to him that I had the privilege to be

taught by Ralph Pite, my undergraduate director of studies, mentor and

dear friend; the debt I owe him for his patient and generous support and

criticism, and his inspirational teaching, is unpayable. I have also to thank

him for the painstaking corrections he made to this essay as its second

reader. As an undergraduate, my understanding of T. S. Eliot also gained

from the teaching of Dr. Eric Griffiths. The most important influence on

this thesis, however, has been that of my long-suffering supervisor and

friend Karl Simms, in whom I was lucky to find someone with a deep

understanding of deconstruction (as well as Wittgenstein, Husserl, and a

great many others), combined with a willingness to share that

understanding with me; it is thanks to him that I came across the most
important ideas in this thesis. Among these, the concept of the gift seems

particularly à propos in describing the support he gave me, thanks to

which I received the British academy grant which enabled me to

complete this thesis. It also aptly describes his willingness to read

attentively all the work which I produced, for overseeing the practical

side of writing the thesis, and for combining his loyal support for my

work with the criticism necessary for its due completion; without his

insistence, I would not have finished.

I am grateful too to the other members of the English Department who

have helped me with my work, particularly Bernard Beatty, Nick Davis

and Andrew Hamer. I have also benefited from the help of Gill Rudd and

Tony Barley. I would in addition like to thank Henry Blumenthal

(Classics), S. R. L. Clark and David Bates (Philosophy). I have benefited

from help and advice from, and discussions with, many scholars outside

the University of Liverpool, namely Günther Gebauer (Berlin), Bob

Griffin (Tel Aviv), Filip Karfik (Charles, Prague), John Kerrigan (St.

John's, Cambridge), Eric Méchoulan (Montréal), Laurent Milesi

(Cardiff), Martin McQuillan (Glasgow), John Neubauer (Amsterdam),

Jon Rée (Middlesex, London), Roy Sellars (Cornell) and Bo Walther

(Odense). I would also like to thank all my friends in Liverpool for their

support, particularly Arthur Bradley, with whom it was a pleasure to have

so many intellectual interests in common. I could not have completed this

work without Sophie Thompson, to whom I owe a special and delightful

debt, which goes beyond the domain of this thesis. I would finally like to

thank my parents and family, whose support has been unstinting in this

endeavour, and in everything I have done; it is to them, naturally, that this

work finds itself dedicated.

To My Parents A Mes
Parents

Francis & Kathleen Woehrling

 Table of Contents

References viii-ix

Short Forms of Citation x-xi

Introduction xii-lxxv

1. The Question: "What is Mimesis?": xiv-xliv

2. Realism: xliv-liv
3. Aesthetics: liv-lxv
4. Chronology: lxv-lxxv

I. Mnemosyne 1-202
(Plato - Nietzsche - Heidegger).

0. Exergue (Socrates's Decision): 1-49

1. The Name of the Law: 49-78
2. Mimesis and Aesthetics: 78-91
3. The Poet and the Sophist: 91-99
4. Concealment, Deception, Exile: 99-111
5. Eikonomics: 111-142
6. Pathos: 142-160
7. Memory and Absence: 160-189
8. Tragedy: 189-201
9. The Poet Within and Beyond Platonism: 201-202

II. Aesthetic Ideas 203-267

(Plato - Kant)

5. Muses: 203-229
6. Vomit: 229-243
7. Consolation: 243-267
III. Intelligence 268-329
(Kant - Baudelaire - Nietzsche - Mallarmé - Valéry).

1. Symbolism: 268-288
2. Poetry vs. Music: 288-298
3. The Formalist Economy: 298-329

IV. Tradition 330-441

(Coleridge - Valéry - T. S. Eliot - Heidegger).

1. Leçon de Valéry: 330-343

2. Il n'y a Pas de Hors-Tradition: 343-356
3. The Metaphysical Subject: 356-375
4. Eliot and Valéry (and Coleridge): 375-413
5. Dante: 413-441

Conclusion 442-454

1. 442-449
2. 449-454

Appendices 455-478
 viii

REFERENCES

All references, in the thesis as a whole, refer first to book or chapter numbers, then either,

where appropriate (e.g. when citing Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Kant), to manuscript page

numbers, or to the page numbers of the particular edition from which I am citing. References

to poems are, where appropriate, first to book or canto number in capitalised Roman

numerals, then to stanza number in uncapitalised roman numerals, and finally to to line

number. References to works in translation will sometimes refer first to the original and then

the translation, divided by a forward slash ('/'). When two page numbers are given for a

translated work (also divided by a forward slash), the first refers to the original, the second to

the translation. I have attempted to use standard translations wherever possible; where no

translation is mentioned the reader may assume that the translation is mine. The same slash is

used to divide references to different publications or reprints of the same work (as with

essays by T. S. Eliot reprinted in different collections), in cases where the reader may find it

easier to gain access to a particular collection. Dates in brackets immediately following the

work quoted refer to the date of first publication in the original language, when different from

the date of publication of the edition used.

At the cost of stating the obvious, the following abbreviations have been used: Vol. for

volume, Bk. for book, § for section, Div. for division, Ch. for chapter, Pt. for part; Pref. for

Preface, Forw. for Foreword, Epil. for Epilogue, Exrg., for Exergue, App. for Appendix,

Conc. for Conclusion and Int. for Introduction; rev. for revised, conj. for conjecture and ed.

for edition. I have also occasionally indicated a paragraph break in unindented quotations

with the following symbol: '[¶]'.

 ix

I have included in the Appendix the unpublished papers to which I refer.

 x

SHORT FORMS OF CITATION

All works are initially cited in full, and any abbreviations, unless an obvious shortening of

the full title, are always specified when the work is first cited. However, it may be helpful to

the reader to have access to the abbreviated form of citation of the following works, which

are frequently cited throughout the thesis:

grammatologie Jacques Derrida. De la grammatologie. Paris:

Minuit, 1967/ Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri
Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974

Collected Dialogues Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, including

the letters. Eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973. 99-122.

Nietzsche Martin Heidegger. Nietzsche (1961). 4 vols. London:

Routledge, 1981-1982. I (1981). Trans. David
Farrell Krell.

'Typographie' Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. 'Typographies.' MIMESIS

DES ARTICULATIONS. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion,
1975. 170- 270.

Gebauer and Wulf, Günther Gebauer and Christoph Wulf. Mimesis:

Mimesis Culture - Art - Society (1992). Trans. Don Renau.
London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California
P, 1995.

CWV Paul Valéry. Collected Works of Paul Valéry. Ed.

Jackson Mathews. 15 vols. London: Routledge,
1958-75.

SE Sigmund Freud. The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
24 vols. Eds. James Strachey (1953-1973, vols. I-
XXIII) and Angela Richards (1974, vol. XXIV).
London: Hogarth, 1953- 1974.

Notes T. S. Eliot. Notes towards the Definition of Culture.

London: Faber, 1948.
 xi

'Frontiers' T. S. Eliot. 'The Frontiers of Criticism' (1956). On

Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957. 103-118.

'Experiment' T. S. Eliot.'Experiment in Criticism.' T. S. Eliot et al.

Tradition and Experiment in Present-Day
Literature: Addresses delivered at the City Literary
Institute (1929). New York: Garden Press, 1973.
198-215.

'Tradition' T. S. Eliot. 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'

(1919). Selected Essays (1932). Third ed. London:
Faber, 1951. 13-22.

'Social Function' T. S. Eliot. 'The Social Function of Poetry' (1943;

1945). On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957.
15-25.

Christian Society T. S. Eliot. The Idea of a Christian Society (1939).

Second ed. London: Faber, 1982.

'To Criticize' T. S. Eliot. 'To Criticize the Critic.' To Criticize the

Critic. Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber, 1965. 11-
26.

Use of Poetry T. S. Eliot. The Use of Poetry and the Use of

Criticism (1933). Second ed. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1964.

'Johnson' T. S. Eliot. 'Johnson as Critic and Poet.' On Poetry

and Poets. London: Faber, 1957. 162-192.

Knowledge and T. S. Eliot. Knowledge and Experience in the

Experience Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1916). Ed. Anne C.
Bolgan. London: Faber, 1964.

'Clark Lecture' T. S. Eliot. 'The Clark Lectures' (1926). The

Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. Ed. Donald
Schuchard. London: Faber, 1993. 43-228.

'Turnbull Lecture' T. S. Eliot. 'The Turnbull Lectures' (1933). Varieties

of Metaphysical Poetry. Ed. Donald Schuchard.
London: Faber, 1993. 249-295.
 xii

INTRODUCTION

Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto,

Ch'un marmo solo in se non circonscriua

Col suo souerchio, et solo à quello arriua

La man, che ubbidisce all' intelletto. 1

That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously

evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other; that, however suddenly

and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as

much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent - is betrayed in the end also

by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of

possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve in the same orbit;

however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic

wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after

the other - to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. Their

thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a

homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul, out of which those

1'The best artist has no concept which some single marble does not enclose within its mass, but only the

hand which obeys the intelletto can accomplish that [or … and only that can the hand which obeys the

intellect achieve]' (Michelangelo. Quatrain lxxxiii (conj. late fourteenth to early fifteenth century);

quoted and translated in Robert J. Clements. Michelangelo's Theory of Art. London: Routledge, 1961.

16).
 xiii

concepts grew originally: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest

order. 2

I remember in 1937 or so, when Peking University was refugeeing across country without

books and giving lectures from memory, the present Foreign Minister of Formosa [George

Yeh] asked me rather shyly whether I remembered what Aristotle did mean by imitation; he

had been lecturing on it for twenty years but now he hadn't got his notes. I promised him that

he couldn't possibly find the answer if he had the biggest library in the world. It is rather

unnerving to have Aristotle say that music is imitation too; you think imitation has got to

mean something wildly profound to make this fit in. Probably that was not what he intended;

he only says 'most lyre and flute art' (Poetics I) and eventually we hear of 'low-class flute

players who sway about if they have to imitate discuss-throwing' (XXVI). Even so, he need

not have meant to imply that there is any good poetry which is not imitation; he positively

asserts, when arguing for the importance of the 'plot', that the poet 'is a poet by virtue of his

imitation' (IX). I do not pretend to scholarship, but anybody can find that much out quickly. It

is a natural rule that once a term is taken as fundamental for a system it gets generalised:

you see the same thing when Coleridge rather charmingly explodes against somebody who

took a simple view of his fundamental term Imagination; he says it has nothing of course to

do with mere images, as a simpleton might think: 'the poet wishes to express … the

substitution of a sublime feeling for the unimaginable for a mere image.' It seems clear that

you aren't meant just to gulp down one of these slogans. 3

2Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York:

Random House, 1966. Pt. I ('On the Prejudices of Philosophers'), § 20, 27. All references to Nietzsche

are to section and page number.

3William Empson. 'Still the Strange Necessity' (1955) 121-122. Argufying. Ed. John Haffenden.

London: Hogarth, 1988. 120-128. This remark was made in the context of Empson's discussion of the
 xiv

1. The Question: "What is Mimesis?"

There is a straightforward answer to the question "what is mimesis?", and I promise without

deception here and now, in the first sentence of this thesis, to give that answer in the fourth

paragraph of the present introduction. Before moving on to the fourth paragraph, it must be

said that such a definition leads to a series of paradoxes, even though it has been formulated

so often as to have become commonplace. Such a movement is inescapable, and is not the

result of any weakness in the definition; it cannot be avoided by a better or more

sophisticated or more inclusive formula. The reason for this is that these paradoxes define

mimesis; without them, mimesis would not be mimesis - at least that is one of the things

which this thesis will attempt to demonstrate.

That does not mean that mimesis cannot be analysed or discussed, only that any

discussion of mimesis must always confront its paradoxes. 4 Confronting paradoxes can mean

Chicago Aristotelian school, as represented by R. S. Crane's The Languages of Criticism and the

Structure of Poetry, of which (along with three other books) 'Still the Strange Necessity' is a review.

4Rather than 'paradox', we might have used the fashionable Greek word 'aporia', which literally means

'to lose one's way' or 'to be without a path (α-ποροσ)', and by extension an inescapable contradiction in

logic, philosophy etc., or a dilemma (double proposition, double logic). In other words, 'aporia' is a

synonym for 'paradox'. It is even a better word for paradox than 'paradox' is: paradox means something

beyond, outlying to, even next to opinion or judgement (doxa). Paradox in Greek might designate an

unconventional opinion which was perfectly logical, and not in the least aporetic or 'paradoxical' in our

sense of the word. I have not used 'aporia', not because of its adoption by deconstruction (exemplified

by Derrida's small book Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993), but because of

the attitude which that adoption has caused in people with a superficial attitude to deconstruction.

'Aporia' is now used to describe what had more commonly been described as a paradox, but with the

implication that there is nothing paradoxical about it. As Eric Méchoulan writes: 'the system of paradox
 xv

which often animates […] conceptions of mimesis only offers the pathetic delight of asserted aporias

[des apories revendiquées]' ('Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 136. Diogène 151 (July-September

1990). 136-152). For one's argument to reach an aporia today no longer poses any difficulty (any

aporia), only because we (imagine that we) are no longer bound by the aporia - we can carry on as

normal. Paradox, on the other hand, has connotations of something old-fashioned, of an argument which

is benighted, or riddled with contradictions; one could not imagine 'aporia' being used to comic effect as

a plot device in Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, for example. 'Paradoxically' then, 'aporia' is

now used to describe what is designated by the radical sense of 'paradox', i.e. a concept which is

unconventional or fringe, but which poses no problem to our high-minded and aporia-welcoming

outlook. At the same time, 'aporia' loses its radical sense of aporia, because we now imagine that the

road is clear, that we can continue despite the aporia. This general attitude, which, I shall argue,

characterises the superficial attitude to deconstruction (chiefly by people who claim to agree with it), is

implicated in the notion that we can leave behind the contradictions - the aporias - of metaphysics, just

as we can leave behind the old-fashioned 'paradox' with the new word 'aporia'. In fact, 'paradox' now has

the meaning which should properly attach to 'aporia': it is something embarrassing ('But isn't there a

paradox in your argument?'), something which does indeed result in our being without a path.

Deconstruction, as we shall repeatedly argue, does not leave behind the paradoxes of metaphysics, it

accepts them: 'To concern oneself with the founding concepts of the entire history of philosophy, to

deconstitute them, is not to undertake the work of the philologist or of the classic historian of

philosophy. Despite appearances, it is probably the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step

outside of philosophy. The step "outside philosophy" is much more difficult to conceive than is

generally imagined by those who think they have made it long ago with cavalier ease, and who in

general are swallowed up in metaphysics in the entire body of discourse which they claim to have

disengaged from it' ('La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines' (1966) 416.

L'écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. 409-428/ 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the

Human Sciences' 284. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London and Henley: Routledge, 1978.

278-293) (cf. also De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Pt. 1, Ch. 1, 24-26/ Of Grammatology.

Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. 12-15 and 'La structure' 411-

413/280-281). The acceptance of philosophy's paradoxes does not involve a submission to them, but an
 xvi

different things, not all of which entail a genuine confrontation. There is, for example, the

attitude of pious resignation, in which the paradox is merely acknowledged along with the

(paradoxical) necessity of acting despite it. This, to take a perspicuous example, characterises

certain approaches to the paradox of ineffability (we cannot describe the ineffable, but we

must nonetheless attempt to describe it). 5 The attitude of pious resignation to this paradox

consists in saying that, since all sayings are doomed to fail, and yet must be attempted, really

all sayings (of the ineffable) are permitted. The paradox here is a kind of inevitable sin,

which one acknowledges at the start of the enterprise, and for which one feels guilty from

time to time ('all this is paradoxical but…') but which then allows us to behave exactly as we

did before (since all actions are equally paradoxical/sinful). 6

attempt to think them in a different way - this different way, as we shall also repeatedly argue, cannot be

described in general, and we will attempt to put it into effect throughout the thesis.

5Cf. Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter (eds.). Ineffability: naming the unnameable from

Dante to Beckett. New York: AMS P, 1984.

6We find an example of such an attitude to mimesis in Françoise Meltzer. Salome and the Dance of

Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1987. Meltzer

argues that Derrida's analysis of mimesis operates a double gesture: on one hand, it denies theories of

language or literary criticism which depend on mimesis, on the other, it denies the possibility of non-

mimetic criticism: 'Derrida's response to Alter and Said [who criticise deconstruction for denying

mimesis] might be that there is no danger of losing mimesis: mimesis is so fundamental to our thought

that it reduplicates itself everywhere, […], even in a criticism that faults another for adhering to it,

consciously or not (Derrida, Culler)' (Intro., 6) Melzer's version of deconstruction's response to the

double bind in which she claims it finds itself is significant: she argues that Derrida carries on as if he

were not in a double bind, while at the same time being aware that he is so doing: 'Of course, in

showing us how texts that profess to retain differences […] in fact subvert themselves by erasing that

difference, Derrida is pointing to a problem in Western metaphysics, in textuality, in thinking itself. On

the other hand, by insisting a priori upon finding the subversion within the opposition, and then

dissolving it, Derrida repeats the very gesture of the text he mechanizes. But Derrida knows that' (10-
 xvii

The (deliberate) generality of our discussion so far illustrates a fundamental aspect of

the paradoxicality of paradox. The paradox cannot be confronted "in general", or as such.

Genuine confrontation with the paradox must be a confrontation with a particular paradox, in

our case, the paradox of mimesis. But mimesis, as we shall see below, exists itself at a level

of generality which cannot be confronted; we can only confront many mimeses, not mimesis

as such or in general. Mimesis then embodies the paradox of the general and the particular

according to which, two sentences ago, we pointed the way toward a genuine confrontation

with paradox: mimesis is by definition a general term which names something which by

definition cannot be described in general terms. Our discussion will confront this paradox,

and continually be called upon to confront a series of paradoxes which attend it, which I shall

now list as a kind of overture to the thesis: the paradox of singularity (an event must be

absolutely unique, and at the same time absolutely repeatable), the paradox of (im)propriety

11). Derrida acts in other words as though it were possible to maintain differences, even though these

differences always, to use Meltzer's quaint phrase, 'dissolve' (the Derrida text she cites says 'resolve'),

but he is aware of this fact; he sins, but he knows he is sinning. This response to the paradox is that of

the mobster who blesses himself before carrying out the drive-by shooting: he acknowledges the evil of

what he is doing ('he knows that') while carrying out the evil act 'he knows' to be evil (he 'repeats the

very gesture'). This, whatever Meltzer thinks her 'differences' with Derrida to be, is a gesture which

Meltzer borrows from Derrida. Meltzer suggests that mimesis, and the binary oppositions which

underlie it, are 'necessary to thought itself' (10). Because of that necessity, the qualms deconstruction

experiences over using the binary oppositions 'are a form of metaphysical and textual leisure which not

everyone can afford to espouse' (11). This is the equivalent of the guilt-ridden gangster being told by his

partner to "quit prayin' and get into the car!": Since the possibility which deconstruction shows to be

impossible is at the same time necessary, Meltzer simply acts as if there were no such impossibility, and

sparing herself the unnecessary luxury of attending to that impossibility. What I will try to show in this

thesis is that deconstruction's confrontation with the paradox is what makes the mimesis (and also truth,

language etc.) on which Meltzer uncritically relies possible.

 xviii

(the proper of mimesis is to impersonate the proper of something else, i.e. impropriety), the

paradox of the gift (1. the gift is distinguished from the exchange by virtue of the fact that the

giver receives nothing in return, 2. is distinguished from accidental transfer or theft by being

intentional, and 3. can only be a gift if the recipient wants what is given to him; if conditions

2. and 3. are met the recipient will feel gratitude, by which the giver will be symbolically

repaid, thereby transforming the gift into an exchange), the paradox of time (because time is

infinitely divided, the only concept of time which escapes a dialectical Aufhebung7 of this

infinite division is one in which there is no time, in which time is always arriving), and the

paradox of (active) passivity (all actions, in order not to follow a definite programme, must

be dictated by the other, and therefore be absolutely passive, but in order not to repeat the

other, and thereby conform to another programme, must be actively carried out in submission

to the other).

The answer to the question "what is mimesis?' which I wish to cite, is that of

Heidegger. But Heidegger's definition is in fact his interpretation of Plato's definition:

Heidegger is translating or paraphrasing Plato (from Greek to German), or imitating him (one

might even say, glossing Plato's classical philosophy into the hermeneutical philosophy

which delimits it):

Mimesis means copying [Nachmachen], 8 that is, representing [dar-stellen] 9 and

installing [herstellen; Krell: 'producing'] something, in the manner in which another

thing is [wie ein Anderes ist]. 10

7Aufhebung is of course the key concept in Hegelian dialectics, and describes the opposition between

the spirit and that which is its negation, and in which the negation of the spirit is 'raised up' into a new

term in which that opposition is resolved. Aufhebung is usually but inadequately rendered as 'sublation'

in English.

8Also the 'doing after' or the 'counterfeiting'.

 xix

[…] das Nachmachen, d.h. etwas so dar-stellen und her-stellen, wie ein Anderes ist.

The choice of this definition as "representative" is motivated by several reasons. Plato

inaugurates the discussion of mimesis, and all subsequent discussions of mimesis, whether

deliberately or not, are imitations of his, 11 as is Heidegger's definition (of Plato's definition).

This fact forces us to understand that mimesis - in this case the mimesis of Plato by

Heidegger - is more than what is commonly understood by 'repetition'. In order to understand

this law of mimesis, we are confronted with another paradox: Heidegger's definition is a

repetition of Plato's; it says the same thing as Plato, and is completely faithful to Plato's

definition. At the same time, it is absolutely original, and says something which was not said

by Plato. And this paradox (of the law of mimesis) is self-reflexive: it follows the law of

mimesis. Heidegger represents and installs one thing (Plato's definition of mimesis) in the

manner of another thing (Heidegger's philosophy).

This paradox can only be understood if we understand that the original term (the one

thing, Plato's philosophy) is not identical with itself. Similar claims have become

catchphrases, closely identified with deconstruction (more of which below), but the specific

claim we are discussing here has a specific meaning. Plato's definition contains possibilities,

all of which are not explored or explicitly stated by Plato. Heidegger's mimesis of Plato's

9Also 'putting there'; Krell: 'presenting'.

10Krell: 'in a manner which is typical of something else'. Nietzsche (1961). 4 vols. London: Routledge

& Kegan Paul, 1981-1982. I (1981). Trans. David Farrell Krell. Ch. 22, 173. My adaptation of Krell's

translation follows Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's partial translation of this sentence into French in

Typographie' 205. MIMESIS DES ARTICULATIONS. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975. 170-270.

11Cf. Jacques Derrida. 'La double séance' (1969; 1970) 211-213 and n 8. La dissémination. Paris: Seuil,

1972. 201-317/ 'The Double Session' 186-187 and n 14. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson.

Chicago: Chicago UP and London: Athlone, 1981. 172-286.

 xx

definition realises these possibilities. In so doing, it repeats something which was in Plato's

text (as possibility) but at the same time writes something which did not exist before. As we

will frequently return to this process, one precision must be made at this point. Although we

describe this process as making explicit something which was implicit, we mean it in a

particular and paradoxical way. 12 What was 'implicit' did not exist (hidden inside the text or

confusedly expressed by it for example, as with a certain kind of hermeneutical reading)

before it was made explicit; it only exists in the new reading (e.g. Heidegger's). At the same

time, this new thing is also a repetition of something in the original (e.g. Plato's definition of

mimesis). The concept of 'existing as possibility' on which we are relying, and which we shall

flesh out by putting it to work throughout this thesis, is one which cannot be understood in a

simple manner. In fact, we shall see that the paradoxicality of our notion of possibility results

from the fact that it works according to the logic of mimesis.

Both of the ways in which the law of mimesis operates here (mimesis as

representation of one thing by another, mimesis as representation of one definition of

mimesis by another) are at work in Michelangelo's quatrain. Michelangelo's concept of

sculpture here is in one sense a perfect illustration of Platonic mimesis: the sculptor

represents the concept (which means grosso modo the same thing as the Platonic idea) in

something else, namely the marble (or in the manner in which the marble is). Michelangelo

relies on the opposition of matter to form, in which matter imitates form by being 'informed'

by it, by being delimited by that form. Plato's condemnation of mimesis results from the

hierarchical valuation of form (or intellect or idea) as superior to matter. By definition, form

does not imitate matter, because it is unique, and superior to it. Form is the unique model of

12'In philosophy, as in any other domain, one has to deal, without ever being sure, with what is implicit

in the accumulated reserve' ('Interview with Derrida' (1983) 108. Trans. David Allison. Derrida and

Différance. Eds. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi. Coventry: Parousia Press, 1985. 107-127). The

interview was granted to the left-leaning Nouvel Observateur.

 xxi

which there are many material imitations. The relation of imitation to original is accordingly

always a hierarchical one, in which the imitation is inferior to the original. 13 This is true even

when the imitation is not condemned as Plato condemns it: the imitation can be valued as a

privileged means of representing the concept, while still being ranked beneath it.

At the same time, the quatrain might describe the way Heidegger sees inside Plato's

work the possibility which he (Heidegger) makes explicit, just as the sculptor sees inside the

marble (or circumscribed by it) the form which he will realise in his statue. According to this

interpretation, furthermore, the imitation could be described as exceeding the model, because

making explicit in it something which was not there before. In Michelangelo's case, however,

this would involve regarding the marble as model, and the intellect as imitating it by making

explicit the possibilities which lay inside it. Both interpretations of the quatrain are possible,

because of the ambiguity of Michelangelo's underlying notion that the statue itself is inside

the marble before the sculptor carves it; the sculpture is imprisoned (circonscriuata) inside

the marble. As such, the hierarchy between marble and concept is not defined, but is open to

interpretations such as the two we have proposed; it lies circumscribed inside Michelangelo's

quatrain so to speak. What we will find in this thesis is that each theory of mimesis - defined

as how one thing represents the other - which we encounter, will always be a mimesis of a

previous theory of mimesis. 14

13The grounds for this inferiority extend beyond the ranking of matter below form: the imitation also

comes after the original in time according to this scheme.

14Mimesis as representation and as imitation (or rewriting) of another text, which we are considering

here as implicated in one another, have been discussed as alternatives to each other in a highly

interesting article: Daniel M. Hooley. 'On Relations between Classical and Contemporary Imitation

Theory: Some Hellenistic Suggestions.' Classical and Modern Literature 11:1 (Fall 1990). 77-92.

Hooley, who writes that imitation as intertextuality is considered 'the poor, distant relation of the grand

Platonic and Aristotelian models' (78), draws a parallel between the rhetoric of Philodemus and Cicero,
 xxii

Returning to the issue of paradox, and its implications for our understanding of the

relationship of deconstruction to the philosophies it deconstructs, I would argue that

deconstruction works according to the principle of mimesis we have just discussed: it makes

explicit the possibility which existed in the previous text. It does not invalidate the previous

theory, in the name of a more sophisticated theory which proves the inadequacy of that

theory; it is from the previous theory that it derives the possibility, the capability even, of

and formalist definitions of literature such as Jackobson's. Both approaches regard literature as a

reference to other literature, rather than mere description: 'literary language turns from mere or purely

sign-signified relations to the conditions wherein language needs to call attention to itself, its own

expressive resources, its rhetoric. Poetic language constitutes its differences from ordinary language by

texturing itself with the traditional devices and conventions of poetry and by drawing self-consciously

from the word-hoard of previous poetry' (81). This is, grosso modo, similar to Bakhtin's definition of

the novel, which he defines as representing the closed discourses of the epic, whereas the epic merely

represents (its ideological version of) the real world (cf. 'Epic and Novel: Toward a methodology for

the study of the novel' (1941) and 'From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse' (1940). The Dialogic

Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin and London: U

of Texas P, 1981. 3-40 and 41-83). For my extended discussion of Bakhtin I take the liberty of

referring, for purposes of economy, to my essay (included as an Appendix to this thesis) 'Is the Novel

Original?: Derrida and (Post-)Modernity.' Post Theory. Ed. Martin McQuillan et al. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh UP, forthcoming. Cf. also Maryse Vasseviere. 'Peinture et écriture: Mimésis et dialogisme

(étude de deux exemples).' Ecrire et voir: Aragon, Elsa Triolet et les arts visuels. Ed. Jean Arrouye.

Aix-en-Provence: U de Provence, 1991. 229-49. Hooley and Bakhtin deserve credit for arguing that

imitation need not be considered in opposition to creativity, but on the contrary the condition of it.

However, they both presuppose a referential (imitative) use of language which is not intertextual, in

opposition to which they respectively define literature and the novel as intertextual. What I have argued

is that the intertextuality which both oppose in one way or another to reference is the very condition of
 xxiii

criticising that theory; and the new theory which it writes (as a critique of another theory) is

at the same time an absolute repetition of the theory it criticises. The deconstructive gesture

is signed both by the author of the text which is being deconstructed, and by the

deconstructive critic. The implications of this is that the potential of the deconstructed text is

realised, rather than denied. And like mimesis, deconstruction also names the process by

which it 'imitates' the texts it deconstructs. It is both simply this relationship of mimesis

(which can be described, as we shall see below, with other words, pharmakon, margin etc.) to

other texts, in which the possibilities of those texts are realised, and the general principle of

that mimetic relationship (deconstruction).

As is well known, deconstruction bases its "imitation" on paradoxes which are

contained in the texts it deconstructs, and this is what motivates the view that deconstruction

merely proves the paradoxicality of the text it deconstructs, before moving on to a more

sophisticated concept (which is then perhaps called 'aporetic'). This approach would assume

that deconstruction is a kind of attack on the text, and that the text's areas of self-

contradiction are weak points: 'In fact deconstructionists treat some works with

uncharacteristic respect, leaving their authority unchallenged. Marx, for instance never seems

to be deconstructed […] Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., seem to enjoy immunity.'15

A salutary exercise, however, might be to ask what difference it would make to Derrida's

analysis if one were to remove from the text he reads the cruxes on which that reading is

based; by rewriting Rousseau, for example, using one word for 'supplément' when it is used to

reference. It is only by virtue of what they present as the defining characteristic of the literary that what

they present as the defining characteristic of the non-literary may be effective.

15Dinesh D'Souza; quoted in Michael Berubé. 'Public Image Limited: Political Correctness and the

Media's Big Lie' (1991) 141. Debating Political Correctness. Ed. Paul Berman. New York: Laurel,

1992. 124-149; my ellipsis.

 xxiv

denote supplementing a lack, and another when it is used to denote an addition to an already

complete whole.

Far from invalidating the deconstructive reading (i.e. by leaving it with nothing to

deconstruct), such a gesture would impoverish Rousseau's text, and reveal the paradoxes

Derrida reads as the most insightful and valuable parts of the text, as the parts which

contribute most to his enterprise. The paradoxicality of the paradox is in fact what enables

the deconstructive reading. To turn it into an aporia in the current sense (i.e. an unaporetic

one), would be to make the deconstructive reading impossible. However, the view of

deconstruction as using the paradoxes of metaphysics as points of attack is also developed by

supporters of deconstruction, who, on that basis, present deconstruction as destroying

metaphysics:

L'hésitation de ces pensées (ici celles de Nietzsche et de Heidegger) n'est pas une

"incoherence": tremblement propre à toutes tentatives post-hegeliennes et à ce

passage entre deux époques. Les mouvements de déconstruction ne sollicitent pas les

structures du dehors. Ils ne sont possibles et efficaces, ils n'ajustent leurs coups, qu'en

habitant ces structures (grammatologie Pt. I, Ch. 1, 39).

The hesitation of these thoughts (here Nietzsche and Heidegger's) is not an

"incoherence": it is a trembling proper to all post-Hegelian attempts and to this

passage between two epochs. The movements of deconstruction do not destroy

structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take

accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures (Grammatology 24; my

emphasis).

Derrida provides the following gloss for 'solliciter', as a description of the structuralist

enterprise:
 xxv

Structure then can be methodically threatened in order to be comprehended more

clearly and to reveal not only its supports but also that secret place in which it is

neither construction nor ruin but lability [my emphasis]. This operation is called

(from the Latin) soliciting. In other words, shaking in a way related to the

whole (from sollus, in archaic Latin "the whole," and from citare, "to put in

motion"). 16

Although Derrida does not credit the particular manner with which structuralism solicits its

structures, he defines soliciting as a shaking of the edifice which does not destroy it ('neither

construction nor ruin'), but which is specifically designed to gain a purchase on it through

which we can perceive it ('comprehended more clearly'). It is the totalising perception of the

structuralist enterprise (which we shall return to in Chapter 3) which motivates Derrida's

disagreement with structuralism. Moreover, the wide semantic range of 'solliciter' nowhere

includes destruction. 17 Taken as a whole indeed, it makes 'solliciter' one of the best

descriptions of the deconstructive gesture. The term is used to mean 'solicit', from its most

deferential sense, as in to request with deference (Gallimard A.1.b) to its most forward, as in

to request with insistence (A.1.c). An archaic and literary meaning - to incite by attracting or

provoking (B.1.a) - carries with it the strategic meaning of the fake-out or wrong-footing

16'Force et signification' (1963) 13. L'écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. 9-49/ 'Force and

Signification' 6. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London and Henley: Routledge, 1978. 3-30.

17Derrida also explicitly criticises the translation of Heidegger's use of the German equivalent of to

destroy ('Abbauen') with '"to deconstruct"' in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

(1980). Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. 267.

 xxvi

('contre-pied') discussed by Derrida, 18 and articulates itself to a semantic range in which the

word means to incite (by means of attraction, seduction etc.) (B.1.a-b). 19

Sandwiched between these two uses is the (often pejorative) meaning most pertinent

to deconstruction: to give a forced or tendentious reading of a text which goes beyond what

the author intended to say (B.2.b). Derrida's reading goes 'beyond the intentions' of the texts it

solicits through a provocation which is both deferential and insistent, which incites their

presuppositions into the open in order to re-inscribe them into a more systematic and

coherent structure. The word 'sollicite' thus carries both aspects of the Derridean critique

immanent to his mimetic reading of metaphysics. It is best rendered either with 'solicit',

which is however a weaker word that does not carry the architectural force of the original

French, or paraphrased (as Derrida does in 'Force et signification') with 'cause a tremor in' (a

translation which suggests itself all the more because of Derrida's earlier reference to the

post-Hegelian 'trembling' which is proper to the 'passage between two epochs'). To 'destroy'

western metaphysics is the gesture attempted by the deconstructionism against which

D'Souza's protest is directed. It presupposes the possibility of an alternative position to the

metaphysical one which would not also be a repetition of it. And this, as we have suggested,

presupposes a particular attitude to the paradoxes of metaphysics, as something to be

destroyed, by blasting through whatever stands in its path and causes there to be no way

forward (aporia), rather than as something enabling (of original repetition). Spivak's lapse is

thus a highly determined one. In translating solliciter - from French to American - with

18Cf. 'Limited Inc. a b c …' (1977) 73. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Ed.

Gerald Graff. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. 29-110.

19It is also used to mean to provoke a physical reaction with reference to muscles (B.2.a) and machines

(B.2.c).
 xxvii

'destroy', Spivak participates in the watering down of French deconstruction into American

deconstructionism. 20

The process of mimesis which we are opposing to Spivak's mistranslation is at work

in Heidegger's translation of Plato's definition of mimesis. Heidegger endorses Plato's

condemnation of mimesis, but offers an alternative to it which, although he refuses to call it

mimesis, works according to his own definition of (Plato's definition of) mimesis. This

alternative is Heidegger's concept of technè, the Greek word whose semantic range covers the

English words 'science', 'art' and 'knowledge'. It is the antonym in Greek of 'Physis', for which

the English translation is 'nature', but also, according to Heidegger, 'Being' (das Sein). 21 The

relationship of these two terms is a relationship of mimesis, in the sense of saying what was

latent in the original (i.e. the sense which corresponds to Heidegger's paraphrase/translation

of Plato's definition). In this sense, mimesis (or, according to Heidegger, technè) is no longer

an inferior reproduction of but an improvement on nature. We find an anticipation of this in

the concept, articulated by Aristotle, 22 and following him Boileau, Kant and Romantic

20I have criticised this translation in 'The Logocentric Assumptions Behind Political Correctness' 121 n

18. Imprimatur 1:2-3 (April 1996). 109-121. During a brief meeting with Derrida at the conference to

which my paper was first delivered, I was able to ask him his opinion of Spivak's translation of this

particular use of 'sollicitent'. He actually seemed not to have ever seen it before, and in response shook

his head emphatically, saying that the translation was an inaccurate one, adding 'c'est vrai qu'elle n'est

pas fameuse la traduction de Spivak' ('it's true that Spivak's translation isn't up to much') (pers. comm.).

Unfortunately, it is largely through this translation (and an introduction which is not up to much either)

that Derrida is known in the English-speaking world.

21Cf. Nietzsche Ch. 13, 81 and Ch. 22, 181.

22Poetics IV, 1448b10-15. Trans. Ingram Bywater. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan

Barnes. 2 Vols. Princeton and Guildford, Surrey: Princeton UP, 1984. II, 2316-2340. The text

employed by this translation is established by R. Kassel (Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1965).
 xxviii

aesthetics generally, that art improves nature, either by idealising it, or by making it possible

to take pleasure in things which in nature would distress, disgust or sadden us (as in

tragedy). 23

All of these definitions presuppose two terms, whether Physis and technè,

hulè (matter) and morphé (form), marble and concept etc. It is according to the relationship

between these two terms, furthermore, that the realm of the creative arts has been defined.

'Technè' can be translated, as we have said, by 'art', and Heidegger argues that it is

Dichtung (poetry) which constitutes technè in its authentic sense. In general, the creative arts

have been defined as the imitation of nature, albeit according to various valuations of this

imitation, some of which style themselves as anti-imitative (secondary reproduction as in

parts of Plato, privileged symbol according to a certain reading of Michelangelo, idealised

version of nature according to the Romantics, original advent of something which hitherto

was only latent in nature according to Heidegger etc.).

However, this presupposes that there is one kind of thing, or group of things, which is

imitated, and another which imitates. That which imitates, i.e. art, is accordingly defined as

language (sometimes in a general sense which includes painting and music etc.), and that

which is imitated as the non-language which it imitates. The issue of mimesis implicates the

question of the status and definition of language, and of how language may represent the non-

linguistic. In Plato's Cratylus, two different ways of understanding representation can be

distinguished: conventional and natural. In the conventional, it is only thanks to an agreed

convention that this piece of language (this word, for example), refers to this thing (its

23Cf. Derrida. 'La mythologie blanche: La métaphore dans le texte philosophique' (1971) 285-287 n 29.

Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. 247-324/ 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of

Philosophy' 239-240 n 43. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Brighton: Harvester, 1982. 207-

271.
 xxix

referent); in the natural, the piece of language (as for example a painting) naturally resembles

the thing which it represents.

The issue of natural representations takes us directly to a paradox which underlies the

distinction between the linguistic and the non-linguistic. This discussion will of necessity,

unfortunately, introduce at this early stage a number of abstract arguments concerning the

nature of language. How is it possible, then, for something to represent something else

'naturally'? The answer is, in the first instance (and this argument of course alludes to a huge

and familiar body of writing on the subject) that each object shares properties with the other.

The representation represents the original by virtue of the fact that it shares certain properties

with that original. In order to be recognised as a representation, these properties must be

identified, along with the properties of the original, and the similarity between the two. This

process has been discussed extensively, and this thesis, so far from denying that it takes

place, positively affirms it. The only thing we must argue is that the recognition of the

properties by virtue of whose similarity the natural representation may be said to take place

cannot be conceptualised in opposition to a certain kind of conventionality. For the properties

(for example the shape of a tree in a painting and a real tree) to be recognised as similar, two

conditions are necessary: it must be possible to abstract the properties from the objects of

which they are the property, and these properties must be repeatable (and therefore applicable

to other properties). The properties must therefore be able to constitute a code.

We must now declare the relevance to this argument of the work of Jacques

Derrida 24 and Ludwig Wittgenstein. 25 Both argue, Derrida in connection with the concept of

24Cf. particularly De la grammatologie and Limited Inc.

25Philosophical Investigations (1953). Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Third ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.

All references are to section and/or page number.

 xxx

iterability, and Wittgenstein in connection with rule following and family resemblances, 26

and for the reasons we have just outlined, that the reference of one thing to another is only

possible by repeating an iterable code. 27 Even when, to take a limiting case, a baby sees a

resemblance for the first time, that resemblance can only be seen by virtue of a code without

which there could be no language. Wittgenstein does not argue that all thought depends on

language in the developed sense, or that babies cannot recognise similarities before they

speak, but that the principle which makes it possible for anyone to recognise a resemblance,

including the resemblances which we describe as natural, depends on the same principle as

language. This is one of the arguments which underlies Wittgenstein's use of primitive

language games in order to understand how developed languages work. We must therefore

distinguish from language in its generalised sense (which includes Wittgenstein's primitive

languages), defined as the following of a repeatable code, and language in its, usual,

restricted sense, defined as 'The whole body of words and of methods of combination of

words used by a nation, people, or race' (OED 1).

One could argue however that the perception of a natural resemblance, although it

depends on a repeatable code, is not conventional, because we can recognise it on our own,

and do not have to agree a convention with anyone else to do so. This is not something I

would wish to deny on an empirical level, and would again positively assert that it happens

all the time. This would seemingly put us at odds with Wittgenstein:

26Passim, especially §§ 195-206, 217-240 and 292.

27For a useful discussion of the similarities and differences between Derrida and Wittgenstein cf. Kevin

Mulligan. 'Inscriptions and Speaking's Place: Derrida and Wittgenstein.' Oxford Literary Review [3:2]

([1980]). 62-67. I should add that the agreement which we are assuming between Derrida and

Wittgenstein on these issues does not imply the assertion that they agree on everything.
 xxxi

Is what we call 'obeying a rule' something that it would be possible for only one man

to do, and to do only once in his life? - This is of course a note on the grammar of the

expression 'to obey a rule'.

It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which

someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one

occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on

(§ 199, 80-81).

This could mean two things: what we are hypothetically calling natural representation would

be an instance of someone doing something which did not involve following a rule, or, that

when we are supposedly following a rule only once, we are actually already doing it more

than once. Here we turn to Derrida's argument in connection with the concept of iterability.

He argues in 'Signature Event Context' (1971) 28 that even a non-referential or performative

use of language (such as making a promise) could only function as such if it repeated an

iterable (or, pleonastically, repeatable) code. This is, broadly speaking, a similar argument to

Wittgenstein's concerning rule following. Only Derrida does not envisage the possibility of

there being a performative which might be singular (or at least refuses to envisage such a

possibility more explicitly than Wittgenstein). For such a possibility to be envisaged, one

would have to posit an original performative (or rule following) of which all subsequent

performatives would be repetitions. In the terms of our distinction between nature and

convention, an original, natural act, would ground all subsequent convention. What Derrida

argues, however, is that as soon as a code which can be repeated, i.e. which can ground

convention, is established, convention is already at work; the very possibility of convention is

28Trans. Weber and Mehlman (1977). Limited Inc. 1-23.

 xxxii

already inscribed in the 'original' performative. 29 All representation is made possible by a law

of language which involves that representation in conventionality. 30

This is an important point, because of its relationship to the wider discussion of

logocentrism by deconstruction. Logocentrism, deconstruction argues, is organised around a

series of oppositions which are analogous to the opposition which we have been outlining

between natural and conventional representation. Specifically, logocentrism opposes writing

29Wittgenstein, I would suggest, argues something which is not dissimilar, when he discusses the length

of the standard meter in Paris, 'of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not

one metre long' (Investigations § 50, 25).

30It is wrong therefore of Anthony Thorlby to argue that Wittgenstein, because of his attempt to arrive

at an anti-philosophy through the examination of language, regards language as autotelic or incapable of

reference: Anthony Thorlby. 'Anti-Mimesis: Kafka and Wittgenstein.' On Kafka: Semi-Centenary

Perspectives. Ed. Franz Kuna. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976. 59-82. Like Derrida, Wittgenstein

demonstrates that the self-referrentiality of language is the condition of its extra-linguistic reference.

The case in favor of natural representation has recently been argued in Joseph F. Graham.

Onomatopoetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. This account, which explicitly aligns itself with

generative grammar and cognitive psychology, and cites Noam Chomsky as a kindred spirit, depends on

a representational view of language: words correspond to mental images, according to laws (generative

grammar) which are the product of psychology. Crucially, these mental images are non-linguistic. The

notion that words correspond to our ideas of things naturally, depends on the psychological premise of

an affinity between words and an activity of the mind which is non-linguistic. As soon the mental

activity is admitted to be linguistic, convention irrupts into the natural process. Graham argues that

words correspond to mental images according to a law of plausibility. He does not however, because of

his refusal to consider the conventionality which underlies our mental activity, give adequate grounds

for saying that a word 'plausibly' refers to an intended object. Graham's concept of psychological

plausibility in fact reduces linguistic activity to an innate and genetic (one might say Pavlovian) sense of

resemblance, more primitive than any of Wittgenstein's language games (more primitive than language).
 xxxiii

to speech as one might conventional to natural representation. 31 Writing, according to

logocentrism, is defined by its ability to refer in the absence of the writer, and in a variety of

contexts different from those intended by the writer. It cannot refer according to a natural and

essential relationship to its intended referent. If it did, it could not - as it does - refer to a

variety of referents in a variety of contexts. Speech, by contrast, and by virtue of the fact that

it always presupposes the presence of the speaker, refers naturally to its referent in a

particular context. Like the natural imitation which we discussed above, it is essentially

connected to its referent by virtue of the presence of the speaker. In the absence of that

speaker, writing can only refer in a conventional and arbitrary manner (arbitrary because it

will repeat the same act of reference, whatever context it finds itself in). This convention, by

virtue (or rather vice) of the fact that it can be repeated outside of the context for which it

was originally intended, makes it possible for writing to refer to something else than that to

which it was intended to refer; writing opens the possibility of semantic drift.

Logocentrism also characterises writing as the imitation of speech, just as, we have

shown, the opposition of natural to conventional reference must regard the natural reference

as a grounding act, of which all conventional references are imitations. Deconstruction, as is

well known, argues however that the possibility of being repeated outside of an intended

context, for which logocentrism criticises writing, is the very condition of speech. Without

this possibility, speech itself would result in an autistic private language. This is not to deny

that people can speak to each other successfully. On the contrary, the repeatable code is the

condition of the most accurate, singular, and personal reference. Deconstruction also argues

that this fact is recognised implicitly (according to the definition of the implicit we outlined

above) by logocentric philosophy. Logocentric philosophy however at the same time resists

31I am summarising here the argumentation of Limited Inc, 'La pharmacie de Platon'. (1968). La

dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. 71-196, 198/ 'Plato's Pharmacy.' Dissemination. Trans. Barbara

Johnson. Chicago: Chicago UP and London: Athlone, 1981. 61-171 and grammatologie.
 xxxiv

that recognition, and attempts to conceptualise a speech which would communicate without

the intervention of convention. Speech, like natural imitation, is a kind of enabling fiction,

with which logocentric philosophy attempts to protect its concept of language from the

possibility of the semantic drift introduced by conventionality (in the sense of an iterable

code).

The generalisation of this iterable code, proposed by deconstruction, problematises

the general definition of art as being a mimesis of the Physis or the non-linguistic. Anything,

including the things of nature, conventionally represented by art, can function as a sign. This

is the famous Derrida argument that 'il n'y a pas de hors texte' ('there is nothing outside of the

text' or 'there is no off-text'32) (grammatologie Pt. II, Ch. 2, 227/158). It would be well to

examine here the meaning of this statement:

I wanted to recall that the concept of text I propose is neither limited to the graphic,

nor to the book, nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic,

representational, symbolic, ideal, or ideological sphere. What I call 'text' implies all

the structures called 'real,' 'economic,' 'historical,' 'socio-institutional, in short: all

possible referents. Another way of recalling once again that 'there is nothing outside

the text.' That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied, or enclosed in a

book, as people have claimed, or have been naïve enough to believe and to have

accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent, all reality has the

structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this 'real' except in an

interpretive experience. 33

32'Hors-jeu' in French is used to describe an 'off-side' in football.

33'Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion' (1988) 148. Limited Inc. 111-160.

 xxxv

Derrida does not deny the empirical existence of that which we initially described as what

was imitated in mimesis (nature, the real world etc.), and nor does he argue that this empirical

existence depends on an object's linguistic apprehension. But he does argue that that to which

language refers can only be apprehended - even before it is referred to by language in the

restricted sense - by a more generalised concept of language as iterable code. There is

therefore no distinction between a linguistic and a non-linguistic sphere; everything to which

we refer already 'has the structure of a differential trace'. This differential trace is the iterable

code which we discussed earlier. In other words, our perception of reality depends on the

same 'conventionality' which makes language possible: for language to refer to its referents,

those referents must already be apprehended linguistically. Language must refer to another

(albeit different) language, in order to refer to things. 34 Again, we are confronted with

different kinds of language. There is a difference between the codes which constitute

language in its usual, restricted sense, and those which enable us to perceive referents such as

inanimate objects (the language which allows us to perceive a rock, before we refer to it with

the word 'rock', might have the same status as one of Wittgenstein's language games).

The consequence of this rather dry discussion - for which I apologise to the reader -

for our attempt to define mimesis are as follows. First, the distinction between mimesis as

34This is a different point from Derrida's analysis of language in its restricted sense. He argues that

language can only refer to something else if it repeats an iterable code, which implies that a linguistic

statement refers to its referent by first imitating language (repeating previous language uses). My point

is rather that for the reference described in the previous statement to take place, the referent must

already be apprehended linguistically. A full statement of the whole process might be that a statement

('this is a stone', to take up the terms of Dr. Johnson) in order to refer to that stone must first repeat a

code (previous uses of the words 'this' 'is' 'a' and 'stone', and, beyond that, the rules of the language

according to which those words are used together (i.e. a propositional statement)), and apprehend that

stone linguistically.
 xxxvi

natural or non-discursive imitation, and mimesis as discursive representation, is not a

difference in kind. 35 To take familiar and limiting examples, an impersonation of one person

by another, a sculpture, and a technical manual, all represent their originals by the repetition

of iterable codes which constitute language in its extended sense. Secondly, anything can

imitate or represent anything else: Delft is a representation of Vermeer's painting of Delft,

and not just for someone (a tourist for example) who had seen the painting before visiting

35The distinctions between these two imitations correspond to a familiar topos of classical scholarship,

namely whether to translate mimesis with 'imitation' or 'representation'. The mimesis of everyday

language which Valéry opposes to poetry is that of mimesis translated by representation. The translation

of mimesis with representation is discussed by Lacoue-Labarthe in 'Typographie' 205 and n 50, in which

its original formulation is attributed to the eighteenth-century writers Herder and Solger (the reference

given by Lacoue-Labarthe is to Lessons on Aesthetics, Pt. 2, III ('Of the Organism of the Artistic

Spirit'), § 1 ('Of Poetry in General and Its Division')). The translation has been accepted implicitly in a

number of English and French translations of Plato (as we could see in our last chapter). The reference

book for a scholarly argument in support of the translation is Hermann Koller. Die Mimesis in der

Antike. Berne: Francke, 1954. The translation has been defended recently by a writer critical of Koller's

work, in a paper at 'Mimesis, Fifty Years Later' at Gröningen in May 1996: Maria Kardaun. Der

Mimesisbegriff in der griechischen Antike. Neubetrachtung eines umstrittenen Begriffes als Ansatz zu

einer neuen Interpretation der Platonischen Kunstauffassung. Amsterdam: Verhandlung der

Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1993 (cf. '"Mimesis" in Platonic Art Theory:

A Reconsideration'; included in App. I, 18). Both she and Koller, for all their differences in

methodology, bring a purely empirical approach to the question which is not relevant to our discussion.

For a brief and severe critique of Kardaun's book cf. D. M. Schenkenveld. 'Maria Kardaun, Der

Mimesisbegriff in der griekischen Antike' (Review). Mnemosyne 47:5 (November 1994). 694-696. Cf.

also Leopold Peeters. 'Le problème de la mimésis en poétique' 21-23 and 29. French Studies in

Southern Africa 17 (1988). 19-30. Alain Rey. 'Mimesis, poétique et iconisme: Pour une relecture

d'Aristote' 19-20. Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture. Eds. Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld and

Roland Posner. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1986. 17-27.

 xxxvii

Delft, and thought that the city had been built using the painting as model (perhaps as a

Vermeer theme park). This is not to argue that the Vermeer painting does not represent Delft

either, or that there are not differences between the way in which the painting might be said

to represent Delft, and Delft the painting. However, we tentatively defined mimesis above as

the representation of one kind of thing (Physis, reality) by another (technè, language). What

we have discovered is that reality is already linguistic, Physis is already technèical. 36

This does not deny the possibility of mimesis, only its specificity. The definition with

which we began this discussion in our fourth paragraph leads directly to this paradox in the

definition of mimesis: we can only define mimesis in a manner which generalises it to the

point at which it seems to underlie everything (everything is linguistic, everything is an

imitation), and therefore is no longer 'defined' (OED ppl. a.: 'having a definite outline or

form; clearly marked'). This is partly what Empson suggests when he writes about the

tendency of terms which are 'fundamental for a system' to 'get[] generalised'. This might lead

us to abdicate any pretence to discuss mimesis, and restrict ourselves to a particular kind or

regional subdivision of mimesis. To an extent, this is what we will do. Our discussion will

concern itself with attempts to define artistic mimesis, that is to say, to define an artistic

sphere which is characterised by a particular kind of mimesis. And we will be focusing

furthermore on a particular kind of definition of artistic mimesis, namely, one which

articulates itself in opposition to a strict realism which would reduce artistic discourse to

performing the same function as other discourses (scientific, philosophical).

This restriction of our ambit to a particular kind of mimesis does not, however, mean

that we must abdicate any purchase on the general characteristics of mimesis. We might for

example regard the particular kind of mimesis we are studying as particularly

"representative" of mimesis in general. But this leads us again to the paradoxical necessity of

36Cf. Derrida, 'La mythologie blanche’.

 xxxviii

addressing the absolute specificity of some thing (a particular instance of mimesis) and its

absolute repeatability (its belonging to a general definition of mimesis). Abyssally, this

movement is already a movement of mimesis, as we saw. Something can be absolutely

unique, and yet imitated by something else, which is itself unique as an imitation, and yet

absolutely derivative of that which it imitates, since the imitation brings out something latent

as possibility in the original. In other words, mimesis 'itself' is fundamental to an

understanding of everything. At the same time as mimesis scatters into the manifold of

mimeses, it underlies any attempt to conceptualise that process of scattering. Mimesis is itself

absolutely specific and absolutely general.

These two contradictory propositions, which one might regard as the first paradox of

mimesis proper, are addressed in 'DES ARTICULATIONS DE LA MIMEUSE':

… the object of this book lets itself be identified without ambiguity: mimesis. For

once, the title does not dissimulate any appeal to some resort of intelligibility which

would arise in the course of [our] reading. One knows right away who is in play: not

the mimesis of this or of that, hence not a mimesis [which is] determined by an object

or a regime; and neither "mimesis" [la mimesis], 37 [a] concept or theme culled from

large discursive or cultural configurations. But indeed mimesis herself, and even

Mimesis, that is to say the eponymous character of all mimeses [les mimesis], of all

37English does not allow for an article before mimesis in the same way as French does. By adding 'la'

('the') in French to say 'la mimesis' instead of just 'mimesis', mimesis becomes designated as a theme or

concept, as a received field of inquiry. To speak of 'mimesis' without the 'la' is more ambiguous, and

might designate specific mimeses, mimesis as theme (as does 'la mimesis') and mimesis the character or

persona. An analogous example in English might be the difference between talking about 'law' and 'the

law'. The inverted commas are a substitute for the effect which 'the' might have if it were possible to say

'the mimesis' in English without awkwardness.

 xxxix

the concepts, themes or theoretical and practical formations which derive from the

mimetic in general. But one is treating here, properly speaking, neither the generality

of the mimetic, nor its particular cases (6-7). 38

This introduction would like to argue the same point. We are neither treating the generality of

the mimetic, nor its particular cases. Rather, we are forced to confront the first paradox of

mimesis proper, by arguing that mimesis is implicated in each particular instance of mimesis,

and that we cannot discuss any particular mimesis without discussing mimesis herself; which

means that we cannot discuss mimesis herself without discussing a particular mimesis. In

order to adequately understand this problem, we must think of mimeses as a mimesis of

Mimesis. Each particular act of mimesis brings out something which was latent in the law of

Mimesis; but that law is only defined by those acts. This cannot be understood, however, as a

process of exemplification, in which a general law of mimesis would be exemplified by

particular mimeses. Rather, a hypothetical first act of mimesis (if such a thing could be

38'… l'objet de ce livre se laisse identifier sans ambiguïté: mimesis. Pour une fois, le titre ne dissimule

aucun appel à quelque ressort d'intelligibilité que seul ferait surgir le cours de la lecture. On sait tout de

suite ce qui est en jeu: non la mimesis de ceci ou de cela, donc pas une mimesis déterminée par un objet

ou un régime; et pas non plus la mimesis, concept ou thème prélevé dans de grandes configurations

discursives ou culturelles. Mais bien de mimesis elle-meme, et meme de Mimesis, c'est-à-dire du

personnage éponyme de toutes les mimesis, de tous les concepts, thèmes ou formations théoriques et

pratiques qui relèvent du mimétique en général. Mais on ne traite ici, à proprement parler, ni de la

généralité du mimétique, ni de ses cas particuliers.' Certain essays from Mimesis have been translated

(Derrida, 'Economimesis') and partially translated (the section on Girard in Lacoue-Labarthe's

'Typographie'; translated in 'Mimesis and Truth.' Diacritics 8:1 (1978). 10-23). But there is, to my

knowledge, no translation of this short introduction (parts of which will however be translated in my

review of Lacoue-Labarthe's Musica Ficta for Angelaki 3:2 (forthcoming, Summer-Fall 1997); included

in App. III). The text is written in italics (with emphasised words de-italicised), and as a series of

fragments which begin with ellipses and uncapitalised letters.

 xl

conceived) would already be conditioned by the law of Mimesis, in exactly the same manner

as the original performative we discussed above would already be characterised by the

repeatability it made possible for the first time. Every act of mimesis would constitute an

absolutely original and specific act, which was at the same time an absolute repetition of the

law of mimesis.

Phrased in this way, we are confronted with an abyssal scenario. Mimesis always

precedes any particular act of mimesis, but it only exists in those acts. Mimesis then is always

constitutionally in retreat and in reserve, in an infinite regress. Any attempt to define it

abstractly will fail because it is particular by definition, any attempt to define it by reference

to its particular manifestations will always presuppose a general definition which precedes

the particular (cf. 'DES ARTICULATIONS' 11). This is what is suggested by Empson's

remark that we cannot understand what Aristotle means by mimesis, even with the biggest

library in the world. Mimesis is originary. At the same time, and this "concludes" (for the

moment) our discussion of this particular paradox, mimesis is by definition something which

refers to something else, and therefore which cannot be originary, at least not according to

the metaphysical concept of origin as extra-linguistic and non-differential, as the essence

which can be named univocally. Mimesis must be considered as an originary difference, as a

difference which grounds the very possibility of similarity. Those familiar with

deconstruction will recognise that the same is true of deconstruction's other 'foundational'

terms such as 'différance', 'margin', 'dissemination' etc. This raises the vexed question of the

relationship between these terms: do they all name the same thing? or if not, what do we

make of the fact that they function according to each other's law, that the law of

dissemination is the law of différance, and vice-verca. The relationship, we can only

conclude, is mimetic (or, equally, a relationship of dissemination, or of margin etc.). Each

particular term is absolutely particular, and yet repeats a law which it shares with the other

terms. And each particular term describes the law which characterises the other terms.
 xli

The practical consequences of this for our discussion is that the particular kinds of

mimesis which we are considering will, by their very particularity, illuminate the general law

of mimesis of which they are the mimesis. Understanding the law of mimesis has definite

implications, not just for the definition of literature, which will provide us with our 'particular

starting point', but for the concept of the subject, for ethics, and for politics. This takes us

back to our earlier assertion that each theory of mimesis is also a mimesis of another theory

of mimesis. This necessity, we now see, is dictated by the law of particularity which we have

just been analysing. Each theory of mimesis is, in its originality, an absolute repetition of the

law of mimesis (a mimesis of Mimesis). But since Mimesis only exists in mimeses (which are

all derivative of her etc.), every theory of mimesis must be a mimesis of another theory. This

is what we have attempted to suggest with our, on the face of it, rather pompous subtitle, 'a

conceptual history of Mimesis', and with the epigraph from Nietzsche. Nietzsche recognises

that the most original philosophemes, however arbitrarily or suddenly they erupt, are related

to the other concepts of philosophy. However new and independent they attempt to be, they

merely fill out an older concept. Every theory of mimesis is by necessity subject to this law:

Heidegger's definition of mimesis is original only as a return to Plato's. Nietzsche makes fun

of philosophy for its atavism, the helpless manner in which it keeps treading old ground

however much it tries to say something original. What we can read with and against him, is

the fact that a certain atavism is the condition of originality. This makes it possible to

postulate the history of a concept, in which a new articulation of the concept can be

absolutely new at the same time as it is a repetition of the same concept. 39

39'The issue is not to take the function of the concept back to the etymology of the noun along a strait

line. We have been attentive to the internal, systematic, and synchronic articulation of the Aristotelian

concepts in order to avoid this etymologism. Nevertheless, none of their names being a conventional

and arbitrary X, the historical and genealogical (let us not say etymological) tie of the signified concept

to its signifier (to language) is not reducible to contingency' ('mythologie blanche' 302/253).
 xlii

In this thesis, each theory of mimesis which we read is absolutely unique, and at the

same time absolutely repetitive of earlier concepts of mimesis, and, through this repetition, of

Mimesis herself. Mimesis can never show herself, but must always be represented by

something else (cf. 'DES ARTICULATIONS' 8). Consequently, the title of each chapter is a

synonym, mask, even disguise for mimesis; each translates mimesis, while being a particular

concept. Mnemosyne (Ch. 1), the goddess of memory, personifies a kind of mimesis, both

because mimesis can be considered as a reminder of the original which it imitates, and

because Plato describes a divine iconography which is predicated on a concept of inspiration

as divine recollection; Aesthetic Ideas (Ch. 2) are for Kant a sensual presentation of the

(unpresentable) rational idea; mimesis is described as a form of Intelligence (Ch. 3) by

Aristotle, restricted to the logos-possessing human being only, and enabling him to learn

about and understand the world around him; 40 Tradition (Ch. 4) in T. S. Eliot involves a

mimetic relationship to the past, in which the past is absolutely repeated in an absolutely

original manner.

This method of organising our material is itself cribbed from MIMESIS:

The only general - but not deliberate - motif which governs this book is that of an

insufficiency of translation: Mimesis does not allow herself to be translated by

imitation, reproduction, simulation, resemblance, identification, staging, analogy etc.

40Cf. Poetics IV, 1448b10-20, discussed below. Mimesis describes for Valéry a kind of worldly

intelligence, to which he opposes an otherworldly and formalistic intelligence, which is itself organised

around poetry's imitation of music.

 xliii

All this still implicates Mimesis, but the latter is implicated just as well in originality,

production, authenticity, propriety, etc. ('DES ARTICULATIONS' 7). 41

Each chapter heading in this thesis names a concept (or, in the case of the first chapter, the

personification of a concept), which is an insufficient translation of mimesis. The (mimetic)

movement from one of these concepts to the other constitutes the history of the concept of

mimesis. This is why the chapters do not refer to the authors of particular concepts of

mimesis, but rather to particular concepts to which the signatures of many authors, and one

author predominantly (Plato for Mnemosyne, Kant for Aesthetic Ideas, Valéry for

Intelligence, Eliot for Tradition), can be attached. This implies a particular attitude to the

signature of each philosopher, according to which it must be considered (in its originality) as

a mimesis of another's signature. 42 The translation of 'la mimesis elle-meme' with 'mimesis

herself', rather than 'itself' can be explained in this context. 'Itself' would have been a stricter

translation, which reflected the fact that all referents have grammatical gender in French but

not in English, and that we would use (with a few telling exceptions such as ships and

nations) 'itself' to refer to entities which were neither female nor male, where the French

would use 'elle-meme' or 'lui-meme'. The metaphors of forgery and of stage personae which

we have been employing to characterise the simultaneous generality and particularity of

mimesis, imply however that mimesis is a character. She is always only represented (as

something else). As we also argued above, this implies that she is always in retreat, and that

her representations cannot yield the whole of her being. The conceptual history of mimesis

41'[L]e seul motif général - mais non délibéré - de ce livre est celui d'une insuffisance de traduction:

Mimesis ne se laisse pas traduire par imitation, reproduction, simulation, resemblance, identification,

mise en scène, analogie etc. Tout cela pourtant implique Mimesis, mais celle-ci est aussi bien impliqué

dans l'originalité, la production, l'authenticité, la propriété etc.'

42Cf. the description of the different philosophers discussed in MIMESIS as masks for each other and

behind which other philosophers appear in 'DES ARTICULATIONS' 9-10.

 xliv

which I am attempting to write, in which we trace her evolution through a series of

conceptual synonyms, is also - to continue the film noir metaphor we introduced above in

connection with Meltzer's attitude to paradox - an attempt to track a mysterious female,

through whose pseudonyms and disguises we can never break.

2. Realism

To the question "what is mimesis?", we can answer then (with Heidegger and Plato) that it is

the representation of one thing by another. This led us to see that representation is originary,

but at the same time that it can only be seen when it takes place in particular acts of mimesis.

Our discussion must therefore, in order to understand the law of mimesis, look at the

particular uses to which it has been put. The use of mimesis on which this thesis will

concentrate is the use of mimesis to define the arts, particularly the literary arts. The question

to which this section is an introduction is therefore: "is there a particular kind of mimesis

which is proper to the arts?". 43

43One answer which we shall avoid, as might have been suggested by our discussion above, is that

literature exemplifies a failure of mimesis. It is important to make this point because of a suspicion,

wholly unwarranted, that the deconstructive analysis of language demonstrates the impossibility of

reference. This argument takes deconstruction's demonstration of the metaphoricity which is the

condition of univocity, for example, to imply that all reference is impossible. It is to this

misinterpretation that Derrida's comment in 'Afterword' on his remark 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte'

responds. To say that there is nothing outside the text does not mean that language is purely self-

referential, but on the contrary that self-referrentiality is what makes reference possible. Cf. Hassan

Melehy. 'Images Without: Deleuzian Becoming, Science Fiction Cinema in the Eighties.' Postmodern

Culture 5:2 (January 1995). (Electronic Journal, no page numbers); Stephen Ratcliffe. 'Uttering

Mimesis.' Occident 103:1 (1990). 120-124; Richard L. Barnett. 'Tentatives néo-classiques ou la défaite

du langage.' The Language Quarterly. (1987 Fall-Winter) 26:1-2. 9-10, 12; Robert Con Davis. 'The

Case for a Post-Structuralist Mimesis: John Barth and Imitation.' American Journal of Semiotics 3:3
 xlv

The writers we will examine all attempt to define literary mimesis in opposition to

the mimesis which characterises other discourses. This leads us to the second paradox proper

of mimesis, namely that of its proper impropriety. Mimesis is defined as the representation of

one thing by the other. That means that there are as many kinds of mimesis as there are things

imitated. The manner in which each thing must be imitated, accordingly, will depend on the

particular nature of that thing, so that mimesis cannot be defined according to a particular

manner of representation. A different kind of knowledge corresponds to each different object

of mimesis (each kind of thing which mimesis represents). This is the problem posed by

Plato's Ion (and in the various dialogues in which Socrates debates with the Sophists): 44

everything which the poet describes falls within the province of a particular kind of

knowledge (if wars, then generalship, if sickness then doctors), and the expert in that field

(the general, the doctor) will be better qualified to describe it than the poet. If defined

according to the manner of imitation, mimesis dissolves into various particular kinds of

knowledge.

(1985). 49-72 and Niels Egebak. 'Représentation et Anti-Mimesis.' Orbis Litterarum (Odense, DK) 26

(1971). 9-19 (Davis specifically claims Derrida as an ally in his critique of representation, Melehy and

Egebak Deleuze as theirs). Barnett, Davis and Egebak problematically assume that all language is non-

referential, but that certain privileged literary texts pre-eminently manifest this feature. A similar

problem underlies David J. MacDonald's attempt to describe the essence of Hamlet as governed by the

supplement and différance, as if everything else was not: 'Hamlet and the Mimesis of Absence: A Post-

Structuralist Analysis.' Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield,

1994. 380-393. Compare also Wladimir Krysinski's deconstructively inspired (according to Krysinski)

opposition of the mimesis of madness to representation: 'The Mimesis of Madness and the Semiotics of

the Text.' Sub-stance 22 (1979). 1-15.

44These are the Gorgias, Euthydemus, Protagoras and Sophist.

 xlvi

Socrates argues on this basis that mimesis merely impersonates different kinds of

knowledge. Its proper function is to impersonate the proper function of others. This is the

paradox of mimesis' impropriety, and one which, as we shall see in the Exergue of our first

chapter, is experienced by Plato without his being able to confront it. In order to criticise

mimesis according to the premises of his philosophy, he must define it, but he criticises it

precisely because it does not have a proper function according to which it might be defined.

As Lacoue-Labarthe argues in 'Typographie', Plato is only able to face this paradox by

representing the poet (the practitioner of mimesis), i.e. by outmiming mimesis. Our

discussion of mimesis will, inevitably, lead us to a more general discussion of impropriety, in

which we will argue that a certain impropriety cannot be exorcised from the subject, and that

the impropriety which Plato expels from the Politeia is constitutive of it.

It is this impropriety which motivates the attempt to free literary mimesis from the

standard of accuracy. If the poet's mimesis of any one thing is compared to that of an expert

on that particular thing, it will always be inferior. This is the conclusion of Socrates in the

Ion. Each writer whom we will analyse attempts to distinguish literature both from other

trades - from the sphere of practical economics in general - and from the standard of realistic

representation. Related to this distinction is the concept of the poem as gift. Rather than

participate in the circular economy of exchange, in which one object is exchanged for

another, and one representation is merely the equivalent of one represented thing, literature is

defined as a gift which exceeds all exchange values, as a representation (of something which)

exceeds all limited (exchangeable) representations.

Before moving on to what they describe as the particular function of aesthetics,

which replaces the attempt to portray the imitated entity as accurately as possible, we must

first point out that such an alternative is not incompatible with a certain restricted realism.

Even Plato argues that the poet's imitation is not completely unrelated to the truth of the
 xlvii

object he imitates, only more distantly than the craftsman's. What I would like to argue is that

this is the first characteristic of what we will be calling, in a highly specialised sense, "the

aesthetic". The aesthetic defines artistic mimesis as being realistic to a certain extent, as well

as related and relevant to the knowledge possessed by particular trades or disciplines, but as

being able to do more than merely represent accurately, thanks to the fact that this demand of

realism, relevance or relatedness is not absolute. The aesthetic does not demand that art

produce an accurate representation of what it imitates, but that that representation be

nonetheless related to it, in a loose sense.

To this argument corresponds a large body of literature, which will not enter the body

proper of this thesis, and of which I will give an overview here. The unifying feature of this

approach (which we shall refer to as "aesthetic realism") is a balancing act between the

function which aesthetic realism ascribes to literature, and certain facts of language which on

the face of it problematise literature's ability to fulfil this function. It seeks to maintain that

literature refers to reality, even though language can never be said to be essentially related to

the reality to which it refers; in other words, it maintains that language can be referential

without being univocal (in the sense touched on earlier in connection with Derrida's reading

of Aristotle). 45 It also argues that literature, while it need not represent reality univocally

45A large proportion of the literature devoted to mimesis is concerned to defend it against an anti-

mimetic or formalist concept of language which argues that mimesis and reference are impossible,

although in a different manner from our own. Frequently, these arguments seek a middle way between

two extremes: a naïve view which assumes that language and its referents are essentially connected, and

an equally extreme denial of reference however. They argue (depending for the most part on speech-act

theory and analytic philosophy) that the lack of such an essential relationship between language and

referent does not preclude reference; the conventions of language, which the anti-mimeticists consider

to be purely self-referential, can actually be used to refer to reality, without presupposing an essentialist

connection between language and referent. What distinguishes our defence of the same principle from
 xlviii

(this having been proved to be impossible), or exactly (this having been admitted to be a job

of a different discourse, and a requirement too restrictive of artistic freedom), nonetheless is

instructive about reality in some other way.

Aesthetic realism, as we have defined it, adapts ('imitates'), whether consciously or

not, a concept of mimesis which is found in Aristotle's poetics. This is not to say that

theirs is that they do not fully account for the constitutive role of iterability in the conventions of

language, which we described above in § 1. The denial of mimesis and reference is, ironically,

frequently attributed to deconstruction, by those making the point we are describing, cf. Robert Storey.

'"I Am I Because My Little Dog Knows Me": Prolegomenon to a Theory of Mimesis.' Eds. Nancy

Easterlin and Barbara Riebling. After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory.

Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993. 45-70; Lissa Paul. 'Intimations of Imitations: Mimesis, Fractal

Geometry and Children's Literature.' Ed. Peter Hunt. Literature for Children: Contemporary Criticism.

London: Routledge, 1992. 66-80; Hooley, 'On Relations between Classical and Contemporary Imitation

Theory' 78, 85 n 23; Sandy Petrey. 'The Realist Speech Act: Mimesis, Performance and the Facts in

Fiction.' Neohelicon 15:2 (1988). 9-29; Margaret Drabble. 'Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in

the Post-War Novel.' Mosaic. 20:1 (Winter 1987). 1-14; Albert Howard Carter III. 'Esthetics and

Anesthetics: Mimesis, Hermeneutics, and Treatment in Literature and Medicine.' Literature and

Medicine 5 (1986). 141-151; A. D. Nuttall. A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the representation of

reality. London and New York: Methuen, 1983. Ch. 1, 28-40; Louis J. Budd. 'An Appointment with

Mimesis.' John O'Hara Journal 3:1-2 (Fall-Winter 1980). 98-102; Walter J. Ong. 'From Mimesis to

Irony: The Distancing of Voice.' Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Languages Association (9:1-2) 1976.

1-24. Similar defences of mimesis which do not specifically target deconstruction include Amy J. Elias.

'Meta-Mimesis? The Problem of British Postmodern Realism.' British Postmodern Fiction. Eds. Theo

d'Haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. 9-31; the essays collected in Logiques de la

représentation. Littérature (Montrouge) 57 (February 1985); Moshe Ron. 'Free Indirect Discourse,

Mimetic Language Games, and the Subject of Fiction.' Poetics Today 2:2 (Winter 1981). 17-39 and

Emerson R. Marks. 'Poetic Equivalent: Mimesis and the Literary Idea.' Western Humanities Review

(1964) 18. 161-174.

 xlix

Aristotle is an aesthetic realist (in other words that his view of mimesis is restricted to those

parts of the Poetics which might be argued to anticipate aesthetic realism), since his

discussion of tragedy provides the basis for a concept of mimesis which demarcates itself

from aesthetic realism. 46 The origin of what we are describing as an aesthetic realist position

can be readily found in several places in Aristotle's Poetics. Aristotle emancipates literature

from any strict correspondence to reality: 'the poet's function is to describe, not the thing that

has happened [τα γενοµενα], but a kind of thing that might happen [γενοιτο], i.e. what is

possible [δυνατα] as being probable [εικοσ] or necessary' (IX, 1451a35). Rather than

correspond to the real, mimesis must correspond to certain principles which may be

abstracted from the real: although the events described by the work may never have

happened, they follow the same rules as acts that have taken place and things which do

exist. 47 At the same time, this freedom from a restrictive relationship to reality can teach us

46Cf. in particular Hölderlin's adaptation of Aristotle's concept of tragedy, discussed by Lacoue-

Labarthe in 'La césure du spéculatif' (1978). L'imitation des modernes. Paris: Galilée, 1986. 36-69.

47Alain Rey demonstrates that for all Aristotle's ontological premises (22-23), mimesis in the

Poetics does not designate a naturalistic concept of imitation, or a demand that the imitation

(minimèma) should aim at being indistinguishable from the original: 'Mimesis, poétique et iconisme:

Pour une relecture d'Aristote.' Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture. Eds. Paul Bouissac, Michael

Herzfeld and Roland Posner. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1986. 17-27. Rather, mimesis implicitly

functions in Aristotle according to a series of conventions, which represent abstract qualities in the

imitated object (such as its actions, its character or ethos, of which term Rey provides an excellent

discussion at 20). The most subjective or expressionist theories of poetry, Rey argues, are compatible

and in a sense derivative of Aristotle's concept of mimesis. For similar attempts to relate Aristotle's

concept of mimesis to non-essentialist concepts of representation. cf. Mieke Bal. 'Mimesis and Genre

Theory in Aristotle's Poetics.' Poetics Today 3:1 (Winter 1982). 171-180; James Redmond (ed.).

Drama and Mimesis. Cambridge; Cambridge UP, 1980. Pref., xii-xiii. and Bradley Berke. 'A

Generative View of Mimesis.' Poetics: International Review for the Theory of Literature 7 (1978). 45-

61. For similar discussions of the Poetics as the matrix of a definition of poetry as related to reality
 l

about reality, as Aristotle makes clear in the second reason he gives for the delight which is

afforded by mimesis:

The explanation is to be found in a further fact: to be learning something [µανθανειν]

is the greatest pleasures [ηδιστον] not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of

mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight [χαιρουσι] in

seeing the picture [εικονασ ορωντεσ; 'seeing the image or icon'] is that one is at the

same time learning - gathering the meaning [συλλογιζεσθαι] of things, e.g. that the

man there is so and so [οιον ουτι ουτοσ εκεινοσ]; 48 for if one has not seen the thing

before, one's pleasure will not be in the picture 49 as an imitation of it

[µιµηµα ποιησει], but will be due to the execution [απεργασιαν] or colouring or some

similar cause (IV, 1448b10-20). 50

Mimesis' freedom from realistic constraints is still beneficial in the real world; it teaches us

about the real world by not being realistic. Mimesis can even present the impossible, but 'one

has to justify the impossible by reference to the requirements of poetry, or to the better

without being secondary to it or imitative in a pejorative sense, cf. Leopold Peeters. 'Le problème de la

mimésis en poétique.' French Studies in Southern Africa 17 (1988). 19-30. Cf. also David Lodge's

discussion of modern British fiction as a revival of Aristotle's concept of narration (diegesis): 'Mimesis

and Diegesis in Modern Fiction.' Contemporary Approaches to Narrative. Ed. Anthony Mortimer.

Tübingen: Narr, 1984. 89-108.

48Fyfe translates more literally with '"that this is so and so"'.

49'In the picture' is an inference by Bywater; Fyfe's 'our pleasure is not due to the representation as such'

is more literal.

50Greek text taken from Poetics. Trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe. Aristotle, The Poetics, "Longinus," On the

Sublime, and Demetrius, On Style. Bilingual ed. London: Heinemann, 1927. 4-117. Fyfe's edition is

based on the Vahlen text (Leipzig, 1885).

 li

[βελτιον] [i.e. describing things as they should be, not as they are], or to opinion [δοξαν]. For

the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility [πιθανον αδυνατον] is preferable to an

unconvincing possibility [απιθανον και δυνατον]' (XXV, 1461b10-15). 51 This corresponds to

wide topos in criticism, which asserts that although literature need not describe the world

with factual accurately, it must give an accurate description of the mental or cultural world,

of people's ideals (to beltion) or what they believe (doxa). 52 Again, the freedom of poetry

from a restricted concept of mimesis has a practical function. 53

51Compare David Gallop's argument that fiction, because it has no recourse to outside evidence, must

be internally plausible (though not directly imitative), in order to 'exhibit […] significant human truth'

(15): 'Can Fiction be Stranger than Truth? An Aristotelian Answer.' Philosophy and Literature 15:1

(1991). 1-18.

52This concept of mimesis finds its way into certain versions of structuralism, which see the forms of

literature as existing in an analogic relationship to the forms of the real world: rather than a word to

object relationship, there is a parallel between the structures which exist between words, and those

which exist between the worlds (cultural, intellectual, real) represented by language. Cf. for example

Jonathan Culler. 'Literary History, Allegory and Semiology.' New Literary History 7 (1976). 259-270

and Gérard Genette. 'Structuralism and Literary Criticism' (1966). Trans. Alan Sheridan. Modern

Criticism and Theory, A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London and New York: Longman, 1988. 63-78.

Sheridan Baker, although he explicitly argues against 'Aristotelians', whom he criticises for 'taking

fiction to imitate reality directly' ('Narration: The Writer's Essential Mimesis' 155. Journal of Narrative

Technique. 11:3 (Fall 1981). 155-165), he develops a definition of fiction as neither purely self-

referential (a view which he attributes to the 'deconstructionists' with as much justice as he attributes

naïve realism to the 'Aristotelians') nor reductively realistic. Instead of imitating the real world in its

objects, they 'imitate a speaker telling us what happened and what people said in an imagined reality we

can all recognize' (163). Baker argues, like Aristotle, that the writer can imitate beliefs (doxa) rather

than objects (pragmata), and the probable (eikos) rather than the things that are (ta onta).

53The best known example of aesthetic realism in the Aristotelian treadition is Erich Auerbach’s

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946). Trans. Willard R. Trask.
 lii

Without wishing to disagree with the approach of what I call 'aesthetic realism' in

principle, I will emit the following reservations. First of all, it does not account adequately

for the representation which it attempts to defend: the whole system of convention, on which

it bases its sophisticated concept of reference, is often merely assumed to correspond to

reality. At other times, the analysis of conventions remains within a logocentric definition of

language, which does not account for its iterable and substitutive nature; there is no

investigation (as there is in Derrida and Wittgenstein), into the grounds of possibility of these

conventions. In other words, their concept of convention is too uncritical (we referred to

Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953. Auerbach interprets different literary styles as embodying different

interpretations of reality. John Boyd argues that Aristotle's definition makes it possible to regard

literature as having a particular function of its own which is not subservient to others (moral instruction

etc.), as a contemplation of the world which exists for its own sake, but which is directed toward the

real world: The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1968. Passim, cf.

Epil., 299. To Plato's criticism of mimesis as inferior to the ideas, he opposes an Aristotelian concept of

mimesis as a privileged form of contemplation and revelation of reality ('A New Mimesis.' Renascence

37:3 (Spring 1985). 136-161). In other words, he (correctly up to a point of course), presents Aristotle

as the origin of what we are describing as aesthetic realism. In his article in Renascence, Boyd urges a

return to an Aristotelian, mimetic and realist concept of art, in opposition to a kind of subjectivist

scepticism which has its origins in Kant, and which J. Robert Barth attributes to 'deconstructors' ('The

Marriage of Imitation and Imagination.' Renascence 37:3 (Spring 1985). 162-165) (the whole issue of

Renascence 37:3 is devoted to a discussion of Boyd's argument, from a variety of aesthetically realist

positions). Jan Brück also distinguishes Aristotle's concept of mimesis from realism, arguing that it

designates an imaginary representation of reality, which, although it need not give a realistic illusion of

reality, must nevertheless be oriented towards reality in a meaningful way. The criticism of mimesis

attempted by modern and Romantic criticism is only justified in relation to the attenuated concept of

mimesis exhibited by Bourgeois realism. 'From Aristotelian Mimesis to "Bourgeois" Realism.' Poetics:

International Review for the Theory of Literature. 11:3 (July 1982). 189-202.
 liii

Gebauer and Wulf's critique of Auerbach on similar grounds above). This shortcoming might

be argued to stem from an often productive but insufficiently radical reading of Aristotle.

I have also argued that we can refer to reality by virtue of a kind of conventionality,

but that this is only possible if there is at work a repeatable code which is generalised beyond

the ambit of literature. Aesthetic realism impoverishes the relevance of the fictional world to

the real world by setting them up in opposition to each other. What I have attempted to argue

is that the fictionality which for aesthetic realism distinguishes literature from reality is the

condition of our apprehension of reality 'itself'. This however also means that literature's

sphere is not autonomous, and that the language it uses is always already conditioned by the

reality which is opposed to it. This is not to say that it is wrong to argue that there is a

specificity of literature, only that it is wrong to ground it on the concept of a reified

alternative literary world.

But there is a more serious criticism to be made of 'aesthetic realism'. At the same

time as aesthetic realism attenuates the relevance of the literary, the specific space it grants it

is too restricted, the world it gives literature to inhabit is too small. The aesthetic realist, by

characterising the work of art as independent from reality, philosophical truth, etc., but only

within limits, predetermines the outcome of the art work's freedom. The work of art is

defined as a particular representation of reality, philosophical truth etc., which, for all its

divagation from the norm of what is considered accurate representation, still represents that

reality, that truth. The alternative world, the internal field of reference and their equivalents,

all yield truths which can be understood and defined by the other discourses and disciplines

which analyse reality, philosophical truth etc. In other words, aesthetic realism reduces, for

all its latitude, the work of art to a form of exemplification, to an ancilla scientifica or
 liv

philosophica. 54 It confronts, in fact, a paradox which is a false paradox. It gives literature a

space in which it is allowed not to conform to logic, but it does so according to logic, it

delimits that space of illogicality according to the logic which is not allowed there. This

paradox is only apparent because the illogicality becomes logical by being circumscribed by

logic; the freedom of art is predetermined by that from which it is a freedom. It is this which

gives, we may suggest, aesthetic realism its sterility. 55

3. Aesthetics

This is not to advocate rigid realism or absolute formalism. Rather, what we must look for is

a definition of art which does not correspond to a (predictable) programme; whose specificity

is not defined as the exception to the rule of another specific discourse. What we are

confronted with is nothing but the possibility of mimesis: the possibility of giving a law for

something which is absolutely original and specific (and therefore not programmed by the

law). The alternatives offered by the authors on whom we will focus in this thesis exhibit the

following similarities. Each argues that the imitations of poetry use their (regulated) freedom

from the restrictions of (a certain rigid) realism to gratify the reader's subjective feelings.

This is the second characteristic of what we are attempting to define, in a specialised sense,

as 'The Aesthetic'. Feelings themselves are defined by Plato (and this definition is not

abandoned, but reworked by the subsequent authors) in a similar manner to the aesthetic

realist's definition of the autonomous sphere of literature. They are not determined by reason,

54Cf. Günther Gabriel's plenary lecture to the 'Mimesis' conference (Gröningen, May 1996): 'Fact,

Fiction, and Fictionalism' App. I. 25-26.

55Perhaps the strongest incitement of Auerbach is a critique, not of his theoretical method, but of his

reading of Dante, which, according to Ralph Pite, like Coleridge in one of his definitions of the symbol,

'starts losing the particular in a celebration of particularity' (The Circle of Our Vision. Oxford: Oxford

UP, 1994. 72 and n).

 lv

but at the same time are not wholly unrelated to it. Their relation to reason is a wayward one

and even an arbitrary one: feelings can sometimes manage to conform to reason, but they at

the same time always reserve the possibility of straying from it. Their coincidence with

reason is a matter of luck. In that respect then, the subjective gratification afforded by

literature, although emancipated from reason (and therefore realism, the criteria of other

disciplines etc.) is at the same time circumscribed by it.

Although Plato in the Republic and in Socrates's polemics with the Sophists is

content to restrict the poet's particular role to subjective gratification, he extends that role in

other dialogues, specifically those in which he discusses divine love and inspiration (divine

love being in fact an exemplary and privileged species of inspiration). We find this extension

of the role of poetry taken up by the other writers discussed in this thesis, who (I argue)

develop their poetics from Platonic premises. Those writers explicitly realise (and perhaps

Plato realises implicitly) that to merely describe poetry as sensual gratification has two

limitations. Poetry would become indistinguishable from other forms of gratification (e.g.

eating crisps, table tennis, scratching one's back), and would become absolutely subjective.

Since poetry's function would by definition merely be to gratify, the best poetry would be that

which gratifies me most. As gratification (again, by definition) is subjective, there would be

no objective criteria for distinguishing good poetry from bad; there would be as many

opinions of poetry as there were people who enjoyed poetry.

Both these problems, implicit in Plato's definition of mimetic poetry, are explicitly

confronted by Kant, whose solution is adopted and adapted by the concepts of mimesis

discussed later in the thesis. He argues that art is a subjective pleasure (Lust) which is at the

same time rational; although each of us experiences it subjectively, we have the right to

expect everyone to experience it: this is what Kant calls the antinomy of Taste. The pleasure

afforded by art, which Kant calls enjoyment (Genuss), is thereby distinguished from other
 lvi

forms of gratification which cannot claim this universality. We will return in more detail in

Chapter 2 to Kant's grounds for making this claim. The part of Kant's argument which is

relevant to our present discussion is his contention that poetry (and art in general, of which

poetry is, for all the writers focused on in this book, exemplary) is not only sensual

gratification, but also the sensual representation of a spiritual content. Two kinds of

inspiration are implied by this assertion: one which enables the poet to write, and one which

affects the reader of his poems. When the reader of the poem is inspired, his sensual

gratification, according to the theory we are examining, leads him beyond the senses to a

supersensual or divine truth which would have otherwise been inaccessible to him.

This returns us to another kind of mimesis however. Broadly speaking, instead of

imitating the real world, or by virtue of its freedom not to imitate the real world according to

certain standards of exactitude (scientific, philosophical etc.), the poem imitates the divine or

supersensual world. Similarly, the poet's inspiration, which allows him to create a work of art

which inspires the reader, is also mimetic, according to a principle which is implicit in Plato,

and which is first explicitly stated by Kant. For Kant, Nature, which creates the world which

gives the artist his material, epitomises absolute freedom: it creates without imitating

anything. The poet must, in order not to be imitative in a restrictive sense, create freely just as

nature does. In asserting his freedom from the imitation of nature, the poet imitates Nature.

The poet does not imitate the products of Nature's free creation (natura naturata) but

Nature's act of free creation itself (natura naturans). 56

This leads us back to the paradox of mimesis as original imitation. How is it possible

to imitate originality? If we are original, we do not imitate it, and if we imitate it, we are not

original, and therefore do not imitate it. The only way for the poet to imitate Nature,

56We are closely following here Derrida's reading of the third Critique in 'Economimesis.' MIMESIS

DES ARTICULATIONS. 55-93/ 'Economimesis.' Trans. Richard Klein. Diacritics 11 (June 1981). 3-25.
 lvii

according to Kant, is for him not to imitate her. Kant's particular articulation of this double

bind resonates in Romantic and modern notions of how one relates to the past. As we shall

see in more detail in the main body of the thesis, that relationship to the past is characterised

by a simultaneous subservience and affirmation of superiority. Theorists of literary influence

as diverse as Schiller, Bakhtin and Harold Bloom, all argue that the literature of the present

can only imitate the literature of the past, which in that sense takes precedence (in the full

sense of the word) over it. But the present, by accepting this constraint, is compensated with

a corresponding freedom, which it derives from its imitation of the past's freedom. According

to a variety of strategies, whose heterogeneity makes this summary by definition insufficient

(until it is read in conjunction with the specific analyses attempted in the main body of the

thesis), the precedence of the past over the present, of nature over the artist, is trumped by

that very present and that very artist over whom they take precedence.

What I will try to describe however, is another model for the mimesis of one work by

the other, of the past by the present (although these terms, if the logic of mimesis which we

are employing is used rigorously, must be put in scare marks, as will be discussed in detail in

our analysis of T. S. Eliot). The artist would relate to Nature - pleonastically - as technè to

Physis: he would say what had been hitherto unsaid by her, but which was contained within

her as a possibility, according to the concept of possibility which we outlined earlier. This

model is also contained as a possibility in Kant's concept of free imitation, alongside the

alternative model of simultaneous subservience to and competition with the past analysed

above. The cohabitation of the logocentric (for, as we shall see below, the competitive

relationship to the past is a logocentric one) and deconstructive concepts of mimesis in the

same work (in this case the third Critique) has important consequences for our thesis. The

deconstruction of a logocentric concept is always already contained in that concept, as

possibility. But it only emerges from that concept according to a certain reading; other
 lviii

readings, by contrast, further develop its logocentrism. In other words, the law of mimesis

characterises the relationship of deconstruction to logocentrism.

The Kantian concept of the poet's inspiration we have just been discussing offers the

(deconstructive) possibility of exceeding a certain manner of understanding artistic creation

at the same time as it (logocentrically) conforms to it. The same is true of Kant's concept of

the reader's inspiration. That inspiration can be understood, in one sense, as the third and

final element of what we have been defining as 'The Aesthetic'. We began with aesthetic

realism, showing that the freedom it gave art was at the same time circumscribed by those

very discourses from which it sought in the first instance to emancipate art. We then

considered the attempt to define art as sensual gratification, and found that, attendent on the

reductive nature of this definition (which made art totally subjective and indistinguishable

from other forms of gratification), was the fact that this gratification was as circumscribed as

the poet's freedom from the truth.

The theory of inspiration we are considering attempts to remedy this deficiency by

also defining art as the sensual presentation of the supersensual. However, the aesthetic

theory which grants art that role also defines and claims to understand the supersensual which

art represents sensually. Thus, Kant formally subscribes on one level to the remoteness of the

supersensual, and so gives the arts a particular function, namely the representation of a

supersensual which otherwise would remain absolutely remote. But he also claims that the

Reason may posit this supersensual, even though it cannot know it. What this means is that

although Kant disclaims any positive knowledge of the supersensual, he argues that our

reason allows us to make presuppositions about it which are necessarily true. Because of this,

the supersensual, of which art is the sensual presentation, is defined in advance (albeit with a

number of reservations) by philosophy.

 lix

In short, Kant's concept of the reader's (or generally the appreciator of art's)

inspiration returns poetry once more to the status of ancilla philosophica or symbol of

morality. Poetry's sensual freedom is circumscribed by its need to represent the supersensual

truths of philosophy. This makes the effect of poetry absolutely programmed. The sensual

representation will always lead to the supersensual. Because of this, the sensual is always

only a momentary hiatus on the way to the supersensual. Just as the imaginary world, for

example, can always be said to represent the real world or communicate some truth regarding

it, so the sensual image of the supersensual always resolves itself into the supersensual. The

consequence of this is that the effect of art is always predictable, and predicted by

philosophy. This is the definition of the aesthetic: the aesthetic is a definition of art by

philosophy which enables philosophy to predict (the effect of) art.

In arguing this point, we are in fact following Heidegger's definition of the aesthetic

in Nietzsche. Heidegger, writes Lacoue-Labarthe, 'calls "aesthetic," in the broader sense, the

entirety of Occidental thinking on art', 57 and the definition of art by philosophy. 58 According

to Heidegger, aesthetics defines the role of art as the granting of sensual pleasure (our second

definition), and that art appeals to the senses in such a way as to draw the appreciator toward

the supersensual (our third definition): 'the representation [Darstellung] of something supra-

sensual in a formed sensual matter.'59 Heidegger argues that aesthetics presents art,

implicitly, as the negative of philosophy, which philosophy can sublate into itself. 60 That is

57Musica Ficta (Figures de Wagner). Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991. Ch. 3, 176-177/ Musica Ficta

(Figures of Wagner). Trans. Felicia McCarren. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 92.

58Compare Simon Walter. 'Aesthetics.' Paragraph (November 1994) 17:3. 194-199.

59Heidegger, first version of The Origin of the Work of Art (1935), unpublished in German, quoted in

Musica Ficta 181/95.

60Cf. Derrida. 'Tympan' (1972) i. Marges de la philosophie. i-xxv/ 'Tympan' x. Margins of Philosophy.

ix-xxix.
 lx

why Hegel can say that 'we no longer have an absolute need to bring a meaning to

representation in the form of art': 61 if philosophy knows the idea, it can dispense with art. Art

is just a moment on the way to the idea. Heidegger writes that 'when aesthetics achieves its

greatest possible height […], great art comes to an end' (Nietzsche 84), and this remark

responds in part to the fact that once art has been fully accounted for by philosophy, it loses

its significance. This is the double bind which threatens any writing on art, including this

thesis: any philosophical work which accounts completely for art makes art redundant. 62

At the same time as the authors I will discuss conform to 'the aesthetic', they also

rebel against it. Their attempt to do so revolves around their answer to the question of the

poet's inspiration. We discussed two alternative ways of reading the imitation which

characterises inspiration in Kant, one of which was logocentric, the other predicated on the

(deconstructive) concept of mimesis as the imitation of one text by another. That concept of

mimesis and of inspiration points the way toward an understanding of art which is not

aesthetic, in the specialist sense discussed above.

In so doing, it also undermines the concept of the subject on which (according to

deconstruction) metaphysics has been based. If, in repeating the other whom we must also not

repeat (the freedom of nature, the concept of mimesis which we are copying), we are creating

something which was not there before, but at the same time is an absolute repetition of the

model, our creation is no longer our creation. It is the creation of that which we repeat. The

thing which is called a subject by metaphysics, and which imitates the other, only creates by

submitting to that other. What was called its subjectivity by metaphysics, is the advention of

61Quoted in Musica Ficta Ch. 3, 182/95.

62Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe. 'La vérité sublime' ([1986]) 110-111. Jean-François Courtine et al. Du Sublime.

Paris: Belin, 1988. 97-147. A good example of this is Kendall L. Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe:

On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard UP, 1990.
 lxi

the other in what it does; what we call its original work, in order to be original, must also be a

repetion of the other. This concept is first discussed here in relation to Plato's concept of

inspiration as pathos. Pathos in Greek describes an absolute passivity, and Plato describes

divine inspiration as a pathos in which the lover is affected from the outside. Such creation,

because of its absolute novelty, does not conform to the programme which defines aesthetics.

The Kantian/Romantic imitative inspiration which we opposed to the concept of

inspiration outlined above is designed, by contrast, to reassert the subject, despite the fact

that its freedom consists in imitation. Underlying this observation is the wider issue of the

relationship between aesthetics and the subject. This is the object of Lacoue-Labarthe's

discussion of mimesis, and is itself organised around a reflection on Heidegger's examination

of aesthetics and the subject. Heidegger argues that Plato's division of the world into sensible

and supersensual spheres, in which the perception of the supersensual sphere from the

vantage point of the sensual becomes the perception of a subject, underlies aesthetics. 63 The

aesthetic definition of art, in turn, defines the gratification which it causes as the gratification

of a subject. Heidegger describes the third period of his history of aesthetics (which

corresponds historically to the eighteenth century), and in which, he argues, the discipline of

aesthetics first arises, in the following terms: 'Falling back upon the state and condition of

man, upon the way man stands before himself and before things, implies that now the very

way man freely takes a position toward things, the way he finds them and feels them to be, in

short, his "taste," becomes the court of judicature over beings' (Nietzsche Ch. 13, 83).

The concept of the subject which we will be criticising in this thesis is similar to the

logocentric concept of speech we discussed above. The subject's actions which can be truly

described as his are those which are motivated by his conscious intentions, and thereby

distinguished from instinctive or mindless acts. The conscious process, in order to be

 lxii

conscious (in order to relate to the real world and to itself), must be a linguistic process.

Language is characterised, furthermore, by an iterable code. This iterable code is in turn

derived from another, not only because we derive our language from previous users of

language, or because we must share our language with others in order for it to be a language

(although both of these are important facts). Even a self-engendered hermit inventing his own

language for the first time, assuming that such a thing were possible, would relate to himself

as other when using that language. Just as the initial establishment of a rule necessarily

presupposes its repeatability, so to the person using language on their own would relate to

their previous language uses as would another person. It is in this sense that deconstruction

argues that language divides the subject. 64

The logocentric attempt to imagine a speech in which the intentions of a present

speaker would be realised without the intervention of conventionality would, if successful,

result in a subject who could act without the intervention of the other. The Romantic attempt

to master its repetition of the past as its own, corresponds to a logocentric attempt to

reappropriate the influence of the other whom the language user repeats whenever he uses

language (i.e. repeats a code which is established by the other). The gratification of that

subject by the work of art cannot by definition therefore countenance the original advent of

the other which, I am suggesting, is not reducible to the programme of aesthetics. The

gratification of the subject which forms part of the aesthetic definition of art, is aesthetic

because it is the gratification of a subject.

The demarcation from aesthetics, in the authors we are analysing, is made possible

by the failure (inscribed into their account of poetry) of the poet and of the poem to reach the

supersensual from the sensual sphere. Plato presents such a scenario in his description of the

63Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Typographie' 209.

64Cf. again 'Limited Inc. a b c' 49.

 lxiii

divine lover in the Phaedrus. For Plato, the divine lover is inspired by his beloved, who

reminds him of the heavens. In so doing, the beloved becomes an image (eikon) of the

heavens, and the sensual love experienced for him by the lover leads him to the

contemplation of the supersensual truth. However, Plato argues that the direct sight of the

supersensual would be too terrible (deinon) for the lover to endure. He also describes how the

beloved's absence makes the lover suffer, and how that suffering as well as the possibility of

the absence which it attends continues when the lover is together with his beloved. Plato

describes inspiration, not as the access to the divine in the sensual, but the experience of its

absence. In other words, the sensual is never transcended to reach the supersensual, and

always contains the possibility of not conforming to the programme of its return to the

spiritual.

My argument also attempts to show that the (aesthetic) desire to experience the

supersensual through the sensual is also a desire for a gesture which would result in the

apotheosis of the subject (the subject in effect would master the heavens). What undoes this

attempt, as we have argued above, is the fact that the subject is constituted by the other, his

actions are made possible by the repetition of a code which he derives from the other.

Derrida, in his examination of the writing myth and the critique of rhetoric which both follow

the speech on divine love in the Phaedrus (La pharmacie de Platon'), argues that writing is

criticised by Plato for precisely this deconstitution of the subject. 65 This argument

corresponds to the now familiar deconstruction of logocentrism. Plato criticises writing for

reminding the subject from the outside, with the marks of the other (allotrion tuhpon). By

contrast, to speak the truth the subject must know it himself, naturally, without assistance

from the outside; 'logos' means in Greek both 'reason' and 'speech'. Plato valorises speech

because, he argues, the speaking subject is not affected from the outside: the words he uses

65He can be said to argue this point throughout his work, but he gives the most systematic exposé of it

in grammatologie.
 lxiv

are always his own, whereas written words, no longer connected to the person who writes

them, are able to deviate from the writer's intention. The deconstruction of this argument

argues that the properties which Plato criticises in writing are the very conditions of speech

(just as metaphoricity is the condition of univocity).

Writing (grafia) and love form a curious parallel in the Phaedrus, in which writing is

criticised for being a lifeless and arbitrary imitation of the truth and of speech (logos), while

the beloved is praised for being a divine imitation of the heavens; writing is criticised for

influencing the subject from the outside (as opposed to the logos which the subject knows

internally), whereas divine love is praised as the possession of the lover by a force which

comes to him from the outside. I would argue that the suffering which attends divine

inspiration and the ineradicable absence of the beloved and the heavens, marks the

intervention of the writing devalorised by Plato in the icon which he praises. And it is writing

which prevents the aesthetic and logocentric accomplishment of the subject. This failure

resurfaces in Hölderlin's description of tragedy, in which the dialectical attempt to reach the

supersensual by transcending the sensual is punished by a rejection of the poet into the sphere

of the sensual. 66 Hence the title of this thesis, which describes an icon which is tragically

prevented from following the programme of aesthetics because it is also writing: tragic

eikonografia.

Chapters 3 and 4 of this thesis describe the poet's act of creation as just such a tragic

experience of eikonografia. Valéry defines poetry as aspiring to an absolutely otherwordly

realm of form. That world can only be created by a poet inspired by the otherworldly.

However, Valéry denies that the poet is inspired, in order to prevent him from being simply a

passive medium. The contradictory demand for inspiration and for the intervention in the

66The relevant passage from Hölderlin is quoted and translated in Lacoue-Labarthe. 'La césure du

spéculatif' 64-65.
 lxv

creative process of the poet's intelligence divides the poet. This division is also manifested in

Eliot's concept of the poet as submitting and extinguishing himself in the act of writing.

We touched on above the fact that mimesis involves a certain depropriation, because

its property is always to mimic the property of other discourses. This is what underlies Plato's

decision to expel the mimetic poet in the Republic. This depropriating faculty of mimesis

intervenes in each of the chapters of this thesis to prevent the accomplishment of the subject

(both of the poet and of the reader of the poem) and of the aesthetic programme. The

concepts of mimesis which we are going to analyse conform to aesthetics up to a point, by

accepting that literature is distinguished by its appeal to the emotions, and by inspiration. But

the concept of inspiration toward which they point is a depropriating one, which involves the

advention of the absolutely other in the subject. It is this advention which demarcates the

concepts of mimesis we are discussing from the aesthetic. The history of mimesis which we

attempt to write is also a history of the deconstruction of aesthetics and of the subject.

4. Chronology

The description of this thesis as a conceptual history, as well as our reference to the

'development' of one theory of mimesis from the other, may have brought about an

assumption which I wish to dispel. It might be thought that this thesis charts the historical

progress from a simplistic concept of mimesis, through various stages of improvement, to end

up in a comprehensive and final concept of mimesis; the thesis would have been written

retrospectively, from the perspective of this final concept of mimesis, as an account of how

the writers I am analysing painfully strove to reach that concept. Thus, one might begin with

a concept of mimesis as divine love and inspiration whose relationship to the poet was

untheorised (Plato), before moving on to a concept which theorised that relationship but lost

the essential notions of suffering and absence in the process (Kant), then to a critique of that
 lxvi

theorisation which stretches to its breaking point the opposition between inspiration and poet

on which the previous concept relied (Valéry), thence to a concept of impersonal subjection

to language, tradition and the other (Eliot), and concluding with a theory which encompassed

all the previous ones, suffered from none of their contradictions, and comprehensively

realised their implicit ambitions - a theory of mimesis to end all theories (Eric Woehrling).

What I have tried to suggest above is that no theory discussed in this thesis can be said to

progress from the other, because its most original contribution is a repetition of the other, the

same theory, in difference. That means that the project of a totalising theory of mimesis such

as the one we have dreamed up could no longer be rewritten in this way, could no longer be

imitated (having said everything); it can only be possible if mimesis is impossible.

The thesis nonetheless in a different sense 'begins' with 'Plato', 67 and then goes on to

consider Kant's rewriting of him. The following chapter then discusses the French Symbolist

rewriting of Kant. The final chapter examines T. S. Eliot's engagement with the critical

movements discussed in the previous chapter. I would like to explain these choices, which

might at first blush seem arbitrary. The choice of T. S. Eliot as the conclusion to our history

is motivated by two factors. The first is that I hope to show that Eliot's criticism is interesting

and valuable in its own right. The second is my desire to counter certain perceptions of Eliot's

criticism. This perception is tied to the contemporary divide in University English

departments between advocates of practical criticism, and advocates of theory. Eliot's

67By beginning with Plato, we might be said to already leave out the pre-Socratic concept of mimesis as

spontaneous creation. This would only be partially true, because Heidegger's critique of Platonism, and

his attempt to arrive at an authentic understanding of alètheia, was articulated as a recommencement of

the pre-Socratic knowledge occluded by Plato. In reading Heidegger, we are reading a version of the

pre-Socratic concept of mimesis. Whether it is possible now to read the pre-Socratics without the

Heideggerian filter is of course an open question. This concept is also discussed in Spariosu, Literature,

Mimesis and Play Ch. 1, 14-17.

 lxvii

criticism is most commonly (although not exclusively, as we shall see) taken to be allied with

'practice' and against 'theory'. Eliot's criticism, according to the assumption which is most in

evidence in the academic divide of which we have spoken, bears no relation to modern

critical theory, and is part of a now outdated mode of practical criticism associated with the

New Criticism. Related to this assumption is the assumption that Eliot's criticism is purely

practical in nature. No theory underlies it, rather, it responds to a variety of different

imperatives, adopting different approaches depending on the situation in which it finds itself

(this is the view of Dr. Eric Griffiths of Trinity College Cambridge). This view is not

incompatible with mine, but can lead to a view of Eliot as wholly unrelated to any tradition of

criticism. Because Eliot's criticism is not theoretical, no past theories of literature are relevant

to it. The argument in this thesis is in one sense an argument against the theory/practical

criticism divide, and attempts to show that the grandfather of many of the assumptions which

underlie practical criticism writes in a tradition which stretches back to Plato.

The choice of Symbolism is justified by its relationship to T. S. Eliot and to Kant. T.

S. Eliot's criticism is articulated to a large extent in dialogue with French Symbolism, of

which he considers himself to be an heir; Symbolism also constitutes a development (perhaps

the most suggestive development) from Kant's aesthetics. Kant's third Critique, I will argue,

is a rewriting of Plato's aesthetics, particularly of the Phaedrus. 68 Whereas Plato praises the

divine lover and distinguishes him from the poet to whom he gives a lower ranking, Kant

grants the poet the faculties and the ranking which Plato grants to the lover. At the same time,

Kant aestheticises Plato's description of divine love. He removes from the account which he

takes over from Plato the element of suffering which demarcated it in Plato from the

68Kant suggests that his critical philosophy is based on a rewriting of Plato in Kant's Critique of Pure

Reason (1781). Trans. Norman Kemp-Smith. Second ed. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1933.

Transcendental Doctrine of Elements Pt. II, Div. II, Bk. I, § 1, B370-A319. Kemp-Smith's translation

was first published in 1929, and relies mainly on the text of the second edition of the Critique (1787).
 lxviii

aesthetic. I shall argue in connection with Symbolism in general, and Valéry in particular,

that at the same time as they reproduce a Kantian aesthetics, they also reintroduce the

element of tragic suffering which Kant's aesthetics had removed from Plato's.

The move from Plato to Kant is, chronologically, a rather giant leap, and leaves out a

large tradition of Platonic commentary which preceded Kant. This is, historically, the most

difficult decision to justify. However, the omission is not an arbitrary one, or one which

corresponds only to my particular prejudices. As some will have recognised, it is a

Heideggerian one. Heidegger criticises Plato, as we saw above, for occluding the pre-Socratic

concept of alètheia. 69 His philosophy is an attempt to renew the pre-Socratic concept of

philosophy. This attempt, furthermore, posited a special relationship between Germany and

ancient Greece, in which the German's were the new ancient Greeks, the people whose

destiny it was to renew the pre-Socratics. But even though Heidegger presented both Plato

and Aristotle at one end, and the German idealist tradition at the other, as participating in the

occlusion which he was trying to transcend or delimit, the model for the relationship of

Germany to ancient Greece on which he grounded that attempt was provided by the

relationship of German idealism to Plato and Aristotle. Both Hegel and Nietzsche are readers

of Greek philosophy and of Greek tragedy. Kant, who for Heidegger (particularly before the

69Alètheia is usually translated by 'truth' in English. Its radical sense refers to Lethe, the river of

forgetfulness. A-lètheia however does not only mean 'unforgotten' however. 'Lethe' also suggests a

concealment, an inability to see, a misunderstanding. Heidegger uses the semantic resource of the word

to translate alètheia as that which gives itself as unconcealed and unveiled. The reference to Lethe also

suggests something drowned or submerged, and alètheia as something which resurfaces, or emerges

into the open.

 lxix

Kehre) inaugurates the possibility of a return to an authentic concept of alètheia, 70 also

inaugurates the critical Classicist/Hellenist tradition in German philosophy. Of course there

were German classical scholars before Kant, but Kant's critical philosophy opposes the

prevalent empiricism of his time with a rationalism whose structure is fundamentally

Platonic.

Kant's third Critique, in our argument, can be read as a critical monograph on Plato's

aesthetics. To underline this point, we even attempt to argue that Kant can be considered as a

Neo-Platonist, by showing the similarities between Kant and Plotinus's Neo-Platonist

interpretation of Plato. But we discuss Kant, rather than Plotinus, because he initiates the

German re-reading of Plato. That reading is, as I shall argue, a Protestant one, and attempts to

subtract Greek philosophy from the Latin filter which was placed over it by the philosophical

tradition which my history has avoided. In accepting the omission of the pre-Kantian Platonic

tradition, we are recognising a certain necessity in the gesture of Kant, and the gestures

(particularly Nietzsche's) which his gave rise to. 71

The German tradition on which Heidegger bases his philosophical project is also that

on which, to a very large extent, deconstruction is based. Our skipping from Plato directly to

Kant is a recognition that Kant's reinterpretation, and those which it made available, were an

70Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe. 'La transcendance finie/t dans la politique' ['Finite Transcendence in

Politics/Transcendence [Always] Ends Up in Politics'] (1981) 157-158. L'imitation des Modernes. 135-

173.

71The concept of mimesis in the tradition which our reading sidelines has been discussed in Gebauer

and Wulf, Mimesis Pts. II-III, Georges Forestier (ed.). La Litterature et le réel. Paris: Aux Amateurs de

Livres, 1989, and John D. Lyons, and Stephen G. Nichols Jr. (eds.). Mimesis: From Mirror to Method,

Augustine to Descartes. Hanover: UP of New England, 1982. For a review of From Mirror to

Method cf. Mary B. Speer. 'Representing Realities.' Degré Second 8 (July 1984).
 lxx

authentic mimesis of Plato's aesthetics. This is not to deny the validity of the intervening

tradition. What we can say however is that Kant rewrites Plato as Plato, but at the same time

as something radically different. In our last chapter we shall follow in more detail Eliot's

argument that we can only have an authentic relationship to a tradition if we are foreign to it.

Kant's interpretation of Plato inaugurates the emergence of Plato's philosophy into a foreign

idiom. It is thanks in part to this foreignness that it is possible today to achieve an authentic

understanding of Plato.

Balanced against this endorsement of Heidegger's history of philosophy is a reserve

toward a certain aspect of the tradition to which he in part belongs, despite his efforts to

delimit it. From Kant until Heidegger, we find a suspicion of representation, which translates

itself into an iconoclastic tendency. I will argue that the attempt by the German idealist

tradition to read Greek philosophy without the impediment of the Neo-Platonist and Christian

interpretation is modelled on Luther's reading of the Bible, 72 which sought a direct access to

the word of God in the vulgate, unmediated by Latin or more broadly by the interpretive

control of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Accompanying this gesture was the

tendency, derived from the Mosaic law, to prohibit religious representation (and sometimes

representation itself). 73 The possibility of direct intercourse with the word of God, it seems,

was related to the view that all images were therefore necessarily a falsification of it. The

image, in other words, constituted as much of a distorting filter over the word of God as

Catholic Christianity and Latin did.

72I owe my awareness of this issue the analyses of Dr. Filip Karfik of Charles University, Prague.

73This discussion is indebted to Jean-Joseph Goux's argument that the Mosaic law resurfaces in the

work of two exemplarily non-Jewish (in the religious sense) Jews, Marx and Freud: Les iconoclastes.

Paris: Seuil, 1978. A suspicion of representation underlies both Freud's determination to decode the

dream-work, and Marx's attempt to address the material conditions disguised by the ideological

superstructure.
 lxxi

German idealist philosophy's attempt to remove the Latin filter from Greek

philosophy is accompanied by a suspicion of the image, just as Luther's attempt to remove it

from the word of God was. Kant's aesthetics, although, as Derrida argues, it still relies on a

form of mimetology (the free imitation by the artist of Nature's freedom), discredits

iconographic representation, that is to say, mimesis in the familiar sense (a representation of

an object or the narration of an action). The discredit of the image underlies Kant's

privileging of the sublime. Kant describes the Mosaic law prohibiting representation as the

most sublime of sublime utterances. 74 The sublime aesthetic described by Kant is an

iconoclastic aesthetic, which refuses to represent what is beyond representation, or which by

showing the inadequacy of a representation pays tribute to its object's ability to exceed

representation. Thus, while Kant's symbols of the supersensual are still representations, their

functions is to lead beyond themselves: the symbol 'prompts, even by itself, so much thought

as can never be comprehended within a determinate concept and thereby the presentation

aesthetically expands the concept itself in an unlimited way ' (third Critique § 49 Ak. 315).

Unlimited expansion is itself a sublime figure, because what is unlimited in its expansiveness

cannot be represented. Kant's presentations expand beyond themselves to show their

inadequacy to what they represent.

74Critique of Judgement (1790). Trans. and ed. Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. General

remark on the Analytic of the Sublime. For discussion cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta Ch. 4, 239-

250/130-137, and 'La vérité sublime' 97-101. Lacoue-Labarthe also points out there is something which

'regularly links Kant to the figure of Moses in the German tradition ("Kant is the Moses of our Nation,"

said Hölderlin)' (Musica Ficta 250/137; cf. also Geoffrey Bennington. 'Mosaic Fragment: If Derrida

were an Egyptian' 101-102. Derrida: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Wood. Oxford and Cambridge, MA:

Blackwell, 1992. 97-119).

 lxxii

With Hegel, a devalorisation of the sublime takes place, which is accompanied at the

same time by an attitude toward art which is underwritten by a logic of the sublime. 75 Hegel

defines the sublime 'as the form which expresses the relationship between God and the things

of nature'. 76 The sublime is predicated therefore on the inadequation of the sensual

representation to its infinite supersensual content (the spiritual). The sublime, Hegel argues,

because it describes the representation of the infinite by the finite, is a contradictory concept.

Rather than defining it, as did Kant, as superior to the beautiful, or as something to which the

beautiful leads, Hegel defines the sublime as a contradiction which prepares the way for its

resolution in the beautiful. The beautiful, by contrast, is defined as the adequation, the

reconciliation, of the representation with its infinite content. The sublime therefore, is merely

the negative concept of the beautiful, and the beautiful is the Aufhebung of the contradiction

of the sublime. Hegel's philosophy is in one sense founded on a (Greek) rejection of the

(Jewish) sublime, in favor of a concept of the adequation of a sensual representation to a

spiritual content, on which, as we have seen, the aesthetic concept of the icon is founded. 77

However, Hegel's aesthetics is founded on a fundamentally anti-representational and,

in effect, anti-aesthetic basis. Art, Hegel argues, leads from the sensual to the spiritual (and

therefore is the contradiction of the sublime), but once we have reached the infinite, we no

longer require art (as we saw above in our reading of Heidegger's definition of the aesthetic).

Art is merely a transitory moment on the way to the infinite. 78 The sublime therefore posits

the sensual as the negation of the spiritual. The beautiful negates this negation by positing an

75This is what Lacoue-Labarthe argues in 'La vérité sublime' 116-118.

76Lessons on the Philosophy of Religion/ quoted in 'La vérité sublime' 117.

77Cf. Musica Ficta 239/130.

78Cf. Rodolphe Gasché. 'Hegel's Orient or the End of Romanticism' 25-26. History and Mimesis

(Occasional Papers III by Members of the Program in Literature and Philosophy). Eds. Irving J.

Massey and Sung-Won Lee. Buffalo: Dept. of English, SUNY, Buffalo, 1983. 17-29.
 lxxiii

adequation between the two. The accomplishment of the dialectic, however, negates the

beautiful's negation of the sublime. The adequation of the sensual and the spiritual is negated

in their Aufhebung into a unity in which the spiritual comprehends the sensual. The icon is

aufehoben in favor of the direct philosophical apprehension of the spiritual; Hegel, for all his

Hellenism, does away with the sensual mediation of the spiritual. The devalorisation of the

sublime in Hegel is accompanied by an iconoclastic gesture which underlies the sublime

aesthetic.

Heidegger, as Lacoue-Labarthe argues, shares and even endorses Hegel's

devalorisation of the sublime. 79 However, he also manifests the suspicion toward

representation which we have been following through the German idealist tradition: 'The

work of art, however, never represents anything [stellt nie etwas dar; Lacoue-Labarthe: 'ne

présente jamais rien']; for the simple reason that it has nothing to represent, being itself that

which must first create [schafft] what, thanks to it, enters for the first time into the open [ins

offene tritt].'80 Heidegger, as we shall argue below, derives his concept of art from his

reading of Nietzsche's break with Wagner. Heidegger argues that Nietzsche's condemnation

of Wagner was motivated by Wagner's aestheticism, by his stimulation of emotion and his

use of the opera as sensual representation of the conceptual. 81 To the mimetic and aesthetic

determination of art, Heidegger opposes a concept of art as technè and Dichtung, which

allows nature (Physis) to reveal herself in unconcealedness (alètheia). Nature, furthermore, is

that which cannot be revealed, which is in retreat as we reveal it. In other words, Heidegger

describes technè as the presentation of the unpresentable, and therefore as a kind of sublime

presentation. And Heidegger's argument takes its point of departure in Nietzsche's opposition

79Cf. 'La vérité sublime' 115-116.

80First version of The Origin of the Work of Art (1935); quoted in Musica Ficta Ch. 3, 180-181/96;

McCarren's trans. heavily modified.

81Cf. Musica Ficta Ch. 3, 188-191/99-101.

 lxxiv

to Wagnerian hysterical aestheticism in the name of art as the law, as the shaping force

(gestalterische Kraft) which delimits Wagnerian excess. Nietzsche opposes this virile

shaping force to the passivity of imitation. 82 Heidegger and Nietzsche share the suspicion of

imitation which, we suggested, they derive from the Reformation, on which they model their

reading of ancient Greece.

This thesis, while recognising the importance and necessity of the reading of Plato

which begins with Kant and ends in Heidegger, does not endorse its condemnation of

mimesis (this in part motivates the choice as our first epigraph of Michelangelo, a maker of

artistic representations who entertained an iconic concept of art, and who was part of the

Catholic tradition sidelined by Heidegger and German idealism). What I will try to show at

work in the concepts of mimesis which succeed Kant's is an attempt to think of the icon, and

of representation, outside of aesthetics. Rather than oppose an iconoclastic non-aesthetic to

aesthetics, we shall attempt to rescue the aesthetic definition of aesthetics from itself. Our

definition began with Heidegger's 'mimesis' of Plato's definition of mimesis. Heidegger, as we

argued above, endorses Plato's condemnation of mimesis, and his reading of Plato, like that

of the German tradition to which he belongs, organises its writing on art around a similar

condemnation. What I will argue is that Plato's philosophy also contains a valorisation of

mimesis, particularly in the Phaedrus. I will thus attempt a reading of Plato which goes

beyond the particular filter which Heidegger places over it. Heidegger and Plato also mark,

for Derrida, the beginning and the cloture (closure, fence) of the logocentric tradition in

philosophy. 83 That tradition, as I have argued above, seeks to imagine a subject which is not

conditioned by the repeatable mark. My analysis will attempt, from beyond and at the same

time within the movement of which Heidegger is the cloture, to reintroduce the repeatable

82Cf. Musica Ficta 206-214/109-114.

83Cf. grammatologie Exrg., 14/4 and Pt. I, Ch. 1, 21-38/10-24.

 lxxv

mark into the concept of the icon which is inaugurated by Plato. To iconoclasm, I will

attempt to oppose iconografy.

 Chapter I

MNEMOSYNE

Plato - Nietzsche - Heidegger

Playing sweetly on the lyre,

the son of Maia boldly stood to the left

of Phoibos Apollon and to the clear-sounding lyre

he sang as one sings preludes. His voice came out lovely,

and he sang of the immortal gods and of the black earth,

how they came to be, and how each received his lot.

Of the gods with his song he first honored Mnemosyne,

mother of the Muses [µητερα Μουσαων], for the son of Maia fell to her lot. 1

0. Exergue: Socrates's Decision

1Style of Homer. To Hermes (Athanassakis conj. vii bc) 423-430. The Homeric Hymns. Trans. and ed.

Appostolos Athanassakis. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. 31-47/ Greek text cited

from Hymnos. Ed. Thomas Allen. Homeri Opera. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1902-1912. V (1912). For

a discussion of the significance of Mnemosyne in ancient Greece cf. Olivia Elettra Ghiandoni.

'Mnemosyne.' Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classica. Ed. John Boardman et al. Zürich and

Munich: Artemis, 1981-1994. VI i (1992), 629-630, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. 'Aspets mythiques de la

mémoire.' Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs. Paris: Maspero, 1965. Ch. 2, 80-107.
 2

[Socrates.] Indeed, I said, our city has many features that assure me we were

right in founding it as we did, and, when I say this, I'm especially thinking of

poetry.

[Glaucon.] What about it in particular?

That we didn't admit any that is imitative [µιµητικη]. 2

This is the first statement on mimesis made by Socrates in Republic X. The merit of

Socrates's arrangement is asserted with special reference to what the politea excludes -

poetry. In making this exclusion, Socrates opens Book X by returning to the question of

poetry, which had been discussed previously in Books II and III. 'Imitative poetry' refers to a

particular kind of poetry, defined in Books II and III, in which the poet pretends to be

someone else (mimesis), rather than narrate the story in his own voice (diègesis). Book X, on

the other hand, engages with a more general concept of mimesis, which includes both

mimesis (in the limited sense of impersonation defined in Books II and III) and narration. We

shall argue in this thesis that Socrates's decision regarding mimesis depends on his ability to

distinguish its definition in Book X from that in Books II and III. But Book X's opening

statement on mimesis actually refers first to the more limited sense which it is going to

expand and supersede. It seems then that Socrates, in moving from the restricted to the

2Plato (v-iv bc). Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube (1974) rev. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett,

1992. X, 595 a. Reference also made to La République. Trans. and ed. Emile Chambry. Platon: Œuvres

complètes [hereafter Œuvres complètes]. 14 vols. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1920-1964. VI-VII (1932-

1934), and to Republic. Trans. Paul Shorey (1930). The Collected Dialogues of Plato, including the

letters [hereafter Collected Dialogues]. Eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1973. 575-844.

 3

general definition of mimesis also suggests that what applies to the restricted definition might

still apply to the general. 3

I would like to begin this discussion by looking at two readings of this gesture (by

Heidegger and Lacoue-Labarthe) which neatly identify the problems with which this chapter

(and the thesis as a whole) will grapple. The thesis will attempt to take an independent

approach from Heidegger and Lacoue-Labarthe, but this independent approach is only

possible thanks to them. The gesture which I am making toward these texts will be

repeated throughout the thesis. The use of 'repeated' is in no way coincidental: in using these

two texts while departing from them, in basing my alternative position on the positions from

which I depart, I am adopting a mimetic relationship to those two texts. My position will

repeat theirs, and be describable from one perspective as nothing but a reading of theirs, a

paraphrase; but it is only by performing that paraphrase that I hope to outline a position

which is different from theirs. This point has been dwelt upon at length here, because I will

be attempting, in a certain way, to do the opposite of Socrates. Socrates in 595 a summons the

practitioners of mimesis in order to dismiss them, and it might be thought that Lacoue-

Labarthe and Heidegger are being summoned at this point for the very same reason. On the

contrary, both thinkers will continue to appear throughout the thesis, whether explicitly - as

signatories of particular texts I quote - or not.

This point of departure is chosen for another reason. Socrates's exclusion of mimesis

and its practitioners the poets, is a gesture which inaugurates Western metaphysics' discourse

on mimesis. Plato himself rewrites this gesture in other dialogues, as do other writers in their

own work. Consequently, the decision in Book X is not presented here as Plato's definitive

3For a recent discussion of the different attempts to address the difference between the approaches to

mimesis between Book X and the earlier books, cf. Anna Greco. 'Plato on Imitative Poetry in the

Republic.' The Journal of Neoplatonic Studies 3:1 (Fall 1994). 141-161.

 4

statement on art, let alone the definitive statement on art. Rather, it is what makes the

subsequent discussion possible, and gives it its direction. Socrates, as we mentioned above,

expels mimesis as soon as he has defined it. And if mimesis is (as Heidegger argues) the

generalised principle for the replacement of one thing by an other, then this expulsion

corresponds to a structural necessity: mimesis by its very nature cannot stay in place once it

is defined, but must immediately substitute itself. Although Socrates returns to the subject of

poetry in order to make a final decision on the subject, which had been held in abeyance

since Book III, the paradoxical nature of mimesis makes such a final decision impossible.

Read in this way, the relationship this thesis aims at with regard to Lacoue-Labarthe and

Heidegger is a repetition of Socrates's. The beginning of Book X is taken as starting point for

our discussion because it sets itself up as a final decision on mimesis at the same time as it

questions that decision; it closes the subject at the same time as it opens it to discussion. And

the two readings of this gesture which we are going to discuss are brought into play here

because they both focus on the confidence of Socrates's recapitulation.

In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger argues that Socrates's renewal of the

discussion of poetry in Book X is made necessary by the fact that

A decision may be reached concerning the essence of art and its necessarily limited

role in the state only in terms of an original and proper relation to beings that set the

standard, only in terms of a relationship that appreciates dikè (justice), 4 the matter of

order and disorder with respect to Being. […] Only after traversing this long and

broad path to the point where philosophy is defined as masterful knowledge of the

4I apologise to those for whom the meaning of dikè might seem obvious.
 5

Being of beings do we turn back, in order to ground those statements which we made

earlier in a merely provisional manner, among them the statements concerning art. 5

According to Heidegger, the discussion of poetry in Book III can only be resolved after

Socrates has established what truth and being are in Books IV-IX, and particularly in Book

VII. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe criticises Heidegger's reading by raising questions about the

confidence of Socrates' exclusion of poetry. Heidegger's explanation is in fact, he argues, a

validation of Socrates's strategy. Heidegger does not, of course, simply adopt Plato's

argument as his own, but rather defends its underlying logic in order to use it as a resource

for his own argument. It is because of this, Lacoue-Labarthe argues as we shall see, that

Heidegger is too Platonic, endorses Plato's rejection of mimesis, and thereby offers 'a

confirmation of Plato's demiurgic mimetology.'6 This confirmation takes place in a specific

5Martin Heidegger. Nietzsche (1961). 4 vols. London: Routledge, 1981-1982. Vol I (1981). Trans.

David Farrell Krell. Ch. 21, 168-169. Nietzsche consists of a revised version of Heidegger's lectures

from 1936 to 1946, and in the early 1950s. The lecture course constituting volume I ('The Will to

Power as Art') was given between 1936 and 1937. Heidegger wrote the lectures which comprise

Nietzsche after his retreat from his involvement in Nazi politics. His reading of Nietzsche, although

never explicitly political, is directed in part at the Nazi interpretation of him. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

argues throughout his work that Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, which in criticising Nietzsche

attempts to liberate its essential teaching, is also the site of Heidegger's polemic with Nazism. I have

maintained Krell's transliterations of Heidegger's Greek citations, even though my own citations from

the Greek use the Greek alphabet. Unless otherwise specified, all references to Nietzsche are to chapter

and page number of volume I.

6('[U]ne confirmation de la mimétologie démiurgique de Platon'). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

'Typographie' 209. MIMESIS DES ARTICULATIONS. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975. 170-270. The

part of 'Typographie' devoted to René Girard has been translated as 'Mimesis and Truth' in Diacritics

8:1 (1978), 10-23. I have throughout translated all passages from this essay myself in order to maintain
 6

part of Heidegger's work, namely the lecture course on Nietzsche, and, in particular, in those

chapters which consider the analysis Plato makes of mimesis in the Republic. Heidegger

examines Plato's analysis of mimesis in order to assess Nietzsche's attempt to overthrow

Platonism (Chs. 20-22). As Lacoue-Labarthe points out on the same page, this is in marked

contrast to Heidegger's general stance vis-à-vis Plato, whom Heidegger usually blames for the

misapprehension of alètheia as idea (which we shall discuss below).

The argument here is complicated, because Lacoue-Labarthe is distinguishing

between two different stances toward mimesis which Heidegger implicitly attributes to Plato.

In Plato's Doctrine on the Truth, writes Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger's

Aim is to show that Plato already did not understand […] the essence and the

meaning of alètheia (but begins to interpret it in terms of homoisis, of adequation - of

accuracy [justesse - 'of doing justice to its model'] and rectitude (orthotès) of gaze

and of enunciation -, [sic] thereby preparing the field of the future metaphysics of

subjectivity [subjectité - lit. subject-ness, the 'being-subject'] and of representation

(Vor-stellung)) […] (209). 7

Lacoue-Labarthe is condensing arguments developed extensively in Heidegger's work. Idea is

the Greek word for forms as well as for sight. Plato, according to the Heidegger of Plato's

consistency. My argument anyway deals for the most part with the earlier part of the essay which is

concerned with Heidegger and Nietzsche.

7'Il s'agit de montrer que Platon ne comprend déja plus […] l'essence et la signification de l'alètheia

(mais commence à l'interpréter en termes d'homoisis, d'adéquation - de justesse ou de rectitude

(orthotès) du regard et de l'énonciation -, preparant ainsi le terrain de la future métaphysique de la

subjectité et de la représentation (Vor-stellung)).'

 7

Doctrine is guilty of reducing truth to an (invisible) realm accessible to sight. 8 By dividing

the world into, sensual and supersensual, (sensual) matter and (supersensual) form, with form

limiting matter and matter being limited by form, Plato then makes understanding of the truth

a matter of imitating the supersensual world in the sensual world, of viewing the supersensual

world from the sensual. It is in light of this that we can understand the perhaps unexpected

judgement that Plato paves the way for a metaphysics of subjectivity (unexpected because

Plato, as is well known, gives subjectivity (aisthesis) a lowly rank, which is subordinate to

the rational and objective truth). Heidegger's description is based on the fact that the

apprehension of the world of Ideas (however difficult) is made by a subject, the theoretical

subject who sees and reasons.

But the Plato in Heidegger's Nietzsche is different. By way of introduction, we will

examine a brief remark by Heidegger on the meaning of dike: 'dike is a metaphysical concept,

not originally one of morality. It names Being with reference to the essentially appropriate

articulation of all beings. To be sure, dike slips into the twilight zone of morality precisely on

8Heidegger observes this fault in Nietzsche too, but, as we are discovering, draws different conclusions

from it later on in his analysis. This is how he initially characterises Plato's position in Nietzsche,

identifying it, as he does in Plato's Doctrine, as metaphysical: 'What is to be known? The being itself.

Of what does it consist? Where is its Being determined? On the basis of the Ideas and as the ideai. They

"are" what is apprehended when we look at things to see how they look, to see what they give

themselves out to be, to see their what being (to ti estin). What makes a table a table, table-being, can

be seen; to be sure, not with the sensory eyes of the body, but with the eye of the soul. Such sight is

apprehension of what matter is, its Idea. What is so seen is something nonsensuous. But because it is

that in the light of which we first come to know that which is sensuous - that thing there, as a table - the

nonsensuousness at the same time stands above the sensuous. It is the supersensuous and the proper

what-being and Being of the being. Therefore, knowledge must measure itself against the

supersensuous, the Idea; it must somehow bring forward what is not sensuously visible for a face-to-

face encounter: it must put forward or present' (Ch. 20, 151).

 8

account of the Platonic philosophy. But that makes it all the more important to hold onto its

metaphysical sense, because otherwise the Greek backgrounds of the dialogue on the state do

not become visible' (Ch. 21, 166). On the face of it, Heidegger is disentangling the

metaphysical definition of dike from its perversion, inaugurated by Plato, into a moralistic

concept. The sentence follows the oppositions analysed by Lacoue-Labarthe in Plato's

Doctrine between the pre-Socratic authentic apprehension of truth, and Plato's ideological

occultation of it; Plato here is responsible for misunderstanding dike in the same way as he

misunderstands alètheia.

But Heidegger immediately goes on to explain the Republic's discussion of

dike according to the definition which the Platonic philosophy is said to have slipped into the

twilight zone:

The decisive insight of the entire dialogue […] says […]: it is essentially necessary

that philosophers be rulers (see Republic V, 473). The statement does not mean that

philosophy professors should conduct the affairs of the state. It means that the basic

modes of behaviour that sustain and define the community must be grounded in

essential knowledge […]. The unconstrained self-grounding of historical Dasein

places itself under the jurisdiction of knowledge (166). 9

The status of this statement is ambiguous, because neither of the two sentences would be out

of place in Heidegger's own work. Heidegger's reintroduction of the meaning of dike, which

is occulted by Platonism, into Plato's dialogue, transforms Socrates's teaching on dike into a

9Cf. Eric Méchoulan. 'Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 141-142. Diogène 151 (July-September

1990). 136-152/ 'Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis and Doxa' 137-138. Trans. Jeanne Ferguson. Diogenes

151 (Fall 1990). 131-148. I have translated all quotes myself because of the wayward nature of

Ferguson's translation.
 9

Heideggerian one. 10 Who then signs this statement, Plato or Heidegger? It is in one sense a

paraphrase by Heidegger of Socrates's teaching; in another, it is a Heideggerian statement

which is made possible by Heidegger's reading of the Republic, or which draws its inspiration

from that dialogue.

I will attribute the statement therefore to 'Plato-Heidegger.' 'Plato-Heidegger' is not a

double-barrelled name, and Plato-Heidegger should not be confused, for example, with the

Shropshire Plato-Heideggers. 11 The term is simply used to do justice to the input which both

philosophers make to the statement signed by Heidegger, to show that Heidegger, in being, in

a certain way, absolutely faithful to Plato in his paraphrase, radicalises Plato's thought in an

absolutely original direction. This movement is, of course, a deconstruction, and it is on this

issue that Heidegger's reading of Plato in Nietzsche differentiates itself from his wider

reading. That wider reading might also be called a deconstruction, in the sense that Heidegger

exposes the underlying metaphysical and ideologico-subjectival premises of Plato's thought,

reading Plato against Plato, 12 to demonstrate that his attempt to understand

10Cf. 'Typographie' 227, where Lacoue-Labarthe describes Heidegger as merely paraphrasing Plato on

this subject. Without wishing to call his conclusions into question, I think we can examine the

relationship between Plato and Heidegger more precisely here by looking at the introduction by

Heidegger of words like dike, defined in a pre-Socratic, Heideggerian sense, into the Platonic system.

11Nor is this coinage original (cf. Derrida's reference to 'Platon-Rousseau-Saussure' in 'La pharmacie de

Platon' (1968) 126. La dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. 71-196, 198/ 'Plato's Pharmacy' 110.

Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P and London: Athlone, 1981. 61-171).

12Citing Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche, Lacoue-Labarthe writes 'but we know that Nietzsche must

be interpreted, like all great thinkers, "against himself"' ('mais on sait qu'il faut interpréter Nietzsche,

comme tout grand penseur, "contre lui-meme"') ('Typographie' 178). Cf. 'Still, in all of this what

remains decisive is to hear Nietzsche himself; to inquire with him and through him and therefore at the
 10

alètheia inaugurates its occultation. As we saw, this condemnation survives to an extent in

Nietzsche, but is modified by the proximity of Heidegger's critique to the text it is criticising.

A closer reading of the foundational texts of deconstruction, notably of Derrida's

grammatologie, reveals that it is just this proximity and the divided statements it produces

which define the gesture of deconstruction in its strong sense. The more commonly

understood meaning of deconstruction, which characterises Heidegger's relationship to Plato

outside Nietzsche, is in fact synonymous with (neo-)Kantian Critique. The proximity to Plato

which Lacoue-Labarthe identifies in the Nietzsche is the result of a change in Heidegger's

approach, from critique to deconstruction. 13

There is thus no contradiction in Heidegger's rewriting of the Republic with a

Heideggerian definition of dikè. The precision with which Heidegger identifies Plato as

same time against him, but for the one single innermost matter that is common to Western philosophy'

(Nietzsche Ch. 4, 24).

13The superficial understanding of deconstruction by those who claim to be in agreement with it results

perhaps, in part, from the frequent conflation of the two terms. Cf. for example Barbara Johnson's

introduction to Dissemination, which was influential in introducing Derrida to the English-speaking

world: 'Best known in this country for having forged the term "deconstruction," Jacques Derrida follows

Nietzsche and Heidegger in elaborating a critique [my emphasis] of "Western metaphysics," by which

he means [?] not only the Western philosophical tradition but "everyday" thought and language as well

[can one really 'mean' 'language as well', if 'there is nothing outside the text']' (Barbara Johnson.

'Translator's Introduction' viii. Dissemination. vii-xxxiii); cf. also: 'It can thus be seen that

deconstruction is a form of what has long been called a critique' (xv). Derrida writes however that 'It is

because it touches on solid structures, on "material" [matériales; the usual French word in this context

would have been 'matérielles'] institutions, and not only on discourses [discours; also 'official speeches']

or signifying representations, that deconstruction always distinguishes itself from an analysis or a

"critique"' (La vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion, 1978. Ch. 1, 23-24).

 11

inaugurating aesthetics could not be more clear on this point (these sentences almost

immediately follows the last sentence quoted from Nietzsche):

That Plato's question concerning art marks the beginning of "aesthetics" does not

have its grounds in the fact that it is generally theoretical, which is to say, that it

springs from an interpretation of Being; it results from the fact that the "theoretical,"

as a grasp of the Being of beings, is based on a particular interpretation of Being.

The idea, the envisioned outward appearance, characterises Being precisely for that

kind of vision which recognises in the visible as such pure presence (167).

The 'particular interpretation' is the same interpretation with which Plato is said in

Heidegger's other writing on Plato to misunderstand alètheia. As will be examined in more

detail below, 'aesthetic,' in Heidegger's vocabulary, is the misunderstanding of art which

accompanies Plato's (and metaphysics') misunderstanding of alètheia. But Heidegger

discriminates between the fact that Plato's question concerning art 'springs from an

interpretation of Being', and the particular interpretation of Being from which it springs.

Heidegger cannot indict the first fact as aesthetic, because he too questions art from the very

same premise; only his interpretation of Being is different. Heidegger describes explicitly

here, but this time with reference to Being, the process by which he read Plato's articulation

of the relation of dikè to the polis on the preceding page. In both cases, he retains the

structure of Plato's hierarchies (the polis must be ordered according to the proper relation to

dikè, art must be ordered according to the proper relation to Being), but corrects Plato's

definition of these two foundational terms by replacing them with his own.

The modification to which Heidegger subjects his analysis of Plato in the Nietzsche

is therefore also a deepening: the analysis in Nietzsche retains the critique of Plato,

elaborated in Heidegger's other writings on the subject, as the inaugurator of the metaphysics
 12

of subjectivity, but at the same time recuperates his thought by rewriting it as a

(Heideggerian) articulation of the proper stance in and of the community toward truth and

justice. This raises the question of why Heidegger's thinking on Plato should be subject to

this modification, of all places in a book which is composed of lectures devoted to Nietzsche.

Lacoue-Labarthe's answer to this question is correct up to a point, but also, I will argue, a

little cursory. I quote from where we interrupted the previous citation from 'Typographie':

The commentary of Book X [of the Republic] attempts to bring back, by way of the

stele, 14 that subordination to rectitude (or to erection), on which the onto-ideo-logy is

entirely founded, to the 'pre-supposition' of alètheia. In the general economy of

Nietzsche, the meaning and the function of this gesture are clear: it is, in the more or

less long term, the only means to maintain the version of the inversion of Platonism,

that is to say the version of an undifferentiated submission of Nietzsche to Platonism

(209-210). 15

14Although 'stele' is the equivalent of the French word stèle, and defined as such in the OED, its use is

almost exclusively restricted to the nineteenth century, and within that century to books and journals

dealing with the archeology and art of the ancient world. I therefore include here the OED's definition,

which is almost identical to that of the Larousse and Robert French dictionaries. It gives as 'stele's' roots

the Greek στηλη, 'standing block or slab', and the Indo-European root word 'sta', 'to stand'. Entry 1a

defines it as an upright slab bearing sculptured designs or inscriptions, adding that it is sometimes

loosely applied to any prepared surface on the face of a building, a rock etc. Definition 1b cites

Hasking's entry in the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: 'Stele. The ornaments on the

ridge of a Greek temple answering to the antifixae on the summit of the flank entablatures are thus

designated.' (Definition 2, as in French, relates to Botany).

15'[L]e commentaire du livre X s'efforce de rapporter, par le biais de la stèle, cette subordination à la

rectitude (ou à l'érection), sur quoi se fonde tout entière l'onto-idéo-logie, à la "pré-supposition" de

l'alètheia. Dans l'économie générale du Nietzsche, le sens et la fonction de ce geste sont clairs: c'est, à
 13

Heidegger, writes Lacoue-Labarthe, must endorse Plato's mimetology, in order to show that

Nietzsche could do nothing but submit to it (by inverting it). But if Nietzsche submits to

Platonism, and Heidegger confirms Plato's mimetology, then, implicitly, Heidegger must also

confirm Nietzsche's mimetology (which is an inversion of/submission to Plato's etc.).

We find this confirmed by the first sentence of Heidegger's introduction to the two

volumes in which his lectures on Nietzsche were published: 16 '"Nietzsche" - the name of the

thinker stands as the title for the matter of his thinking. [¶] The matter, the point in question,

is in itself a confrontation [Auseinandersetzung]' (xv). 'Auseinandersetzen' means literally to

set one thing apart from another (ein aus ein ander). It is rendered in French translations of

Heidegger as 'explication' (whose root 'ex-pli-cation', an unfolding or twisting out, carries

some of the literal German meaning), which means in French both 'explanation', and 'to have

an argument or a disagreement'. This double meaning makes it a key word for describing the

relationship between writers which we are discussing: by arguing with someone, you explain

their argument, and bring its truth out into the open. Argument in English has a similar range

('to argue with your neighbor' vs. 'Spinoza's argument'), but lacks the sense of unfolding and

explanation. The range of 'explication' in English is similar to the French, except that the

OED does not list anything which corresponds to the argumentative performance of

explication. Krell's decision to translate with 'confrontation' does justice to the argumentative

performance of the term, but muffles the explanatory one. The least bad solution might be to

plus ou moins long terme, le seul moyen de maintenir la version de l'inversion du platonisme, c'est-à-

dire la version d'une soumission sans partage de Nietzsche au platonisme.'

16The English translation is in four volumes, the French, like the original, in two.
 14

translate with 'explication', but I have decided to retain Krell's translation throughout unless

otherwise specified. 17

17The term has recently been translated at times as 'differential explanation' - a translation which, I

would argue, exemplifies the misunderstandings to which the term Auseinandersetzung can be

subjected - in the English version of Lacoue-Labarthe's Musica Ficta (Figures de Wagner). Paris:

Christian Bourgois, 1991/ Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner). Trans. Felicia McCarren. Stanford:

Stanford UP, 1995. For an extended discussion of Musica Ficta and the weakness of McCarren’s

translation I refer the reader to my review (Angelaki 3:2, forthcoming 1997; included in App. IV). This

is McCarren’s justification of her translation: 'Krell's English translation gives “confrontation.” We

have changed this translation to “differential explication,” or just “explication.” There is a semantic

shadow of the agonal sense of “confrontation” in Auseinandersetzung, but in Heidegger it means

“setting apart” and thereby opening a clarifying difference between two positions, such as those of two

people conversing or a reader confronting a text’ (157 n 27). McCarren considers the confrontational

and the explanatory senses of ‘explication’ as two alternatives between which the translator must

choose ('There is a semantic shadow of … confrontation … but in Heidegger it means …'). This,

however, is entirely at odds with the Musica Ficta's central thesis: confrontation often conceals and is

essential to agreement and collaboration, and vice versa. By retreating from Wagner, each writer in a

certain sense retraces him. Furthermore, the only meaning of explication which is not translated by

'explication' is precisely the sense of confrontation which McCarren claims to downplay with her

translation. If what McCarren says is right, then 'explication' is a perfect translation on its own, and

there is no need for the addition of 'differential'. The closest she comes to justifying this addition is her

reference to 'opening up a clarifying difference between two positions', which I think does nothing but

muddy the waters. Certainly, Auseinandersetzung can have this meaning in German. The performance

of explication (and, as we shall see, of Auseinandersetzung 'in Heidegger') is different however: it turns

the text inside out, argues with it, but thereby gives the truth of it and saves it. One position is set apart,

not two; it is transformed into a better position in the process, but one which nevertheless retains a link

to the original position of which it is the truth, so that it is illegitimate to seek to establish it as an

independent alternative position. This is constantly argued in Nietzsche and in Musica Ficta, and by the
 15

Auseinandersetzung is a privileged term in Nietzsche, 18 and describes the

deconstructive relationship which that work inaugurates vis-à-vis Plato:

The task of our lecture course is to elucidate the fundamental position within which

Nietzsche unfolds the guiding question of Western thought and responds to it. Such

elucidation is needed in order to prepare a confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with

Nietzsche. If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is

gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche

becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.

[…]

Confrontation is genuine criticism. It is the supreme way, the only way, to a

true estimation of a thinker. In confrontation we undertake to reflect on his thinking

and to trace it in its effective force, not in its weakness. To what purpose? In order

project of deconstruction in general (to which, could it be, McCarren thought she was alluding with her

use of 'differential'?).

18The word crops up throughout the book when Heidegger is describing his relationship to the

metaphysical tradition about which he is writing. The term is used, crucially, to describe Nietzsche's

attempt to rescue something from his relationship to Wagner: 'Nietzsche waited for many years, hoping

for the possibility of a fruitful confrontation with Wagner' (88). Nietzsche's relation to Schopenhauer's

metaphysics (Ch. 14, 102, Ch. 17, 130) and Platonism (Ch. 20, 156), is also described as confrontation.

His relationship to Descartes, Kant and Hegel is described according to the structure of confrontation

we are examining, but without that word being explicitly used (Ch. 15, 111, Ch. 19, 149). Relationships

between nations, which are characterised 'neither [as] isolation from other nations nor hegemony over

them', are also described as a confrontation (Ch. 20, 158). Cf. also Ch. 13, 79 and Ch. 16, 122.
 16

that through the confrontation we ourselves may become free for the supreme

exertion of thinking (Nietzsche Ch. 1, 4-5). 19

If the confrontation with Nietzsche is one with 'all Western thought hitherto', then Plato must

also be included in the confrontation. And Plato must be included in this confrontation in a

central position, as he is the philosopher around whom Nietzsche organises his confrontation

with Western philosophy, which Nietzsche also describes as 'inverted Platonism'. 20 The

confrontation which preoccupies itself with the 'effective force' of the thought it confronts, in

order to liberate its own 'exertion of thinking', describes exactly the modification which

Heidegger introduces into his reading of Plato in Nietzsche (and, as we are demonstrating,

with Nietzsche). The analysis in Nietzsche differs from that in Plato's Doctrine because it is a

confrontation: it examines Plato's work in its effective force, and uses it to articulate

Heidegger's own thought. 21

19Cf. also 'Those are indeed the questions that inquire beyond Nietzsche. But they alone provide the

guarantee that we will bring his thought out into the open and make it fruitful, and also that we will

come to experience and know the essential borders between us, recognising what is different in him'

(Ch. 11, 68).

20See Nietzsche Ch. 20, 154 and 'Typographie' 176 and 182 for a discussion of this large topos.

21The subordination of mimesis to demiurgical poesis, which we will examine below, takes place,

according to Lacoue-Labarthe, 'when it is Heidegger who speaks through Plato's mouth - and who

rewrites him' (lorsque c'est Heidegger qui parle par la bouche de Platon - et qui le réecrit' ('Typographie'

215); and, 'Heidegger's commentary on [Plato's text] is at the limit more Platonist than Plato himself'

('dans le texte de Platon comme dans le commentaire, à la limite plus platonicien que Platon lui-meme,

qu'en donne Heidegger') ('Typographie' 216). Lacoue-Labarthe writes that in the case of Heidegger,

mimesis is 'referred to alètheia (to the "stele"), [and] thought in agreement with Plato (but according to

a movement which pushes him to the limit, if it doesn't frankly carry him beyond himself), as

disinstallation' ('dans un cas - Heidegger - , référée donc à l'alèthéia (à la "stèle"), la mimesis est
 17

This proximity to Nietzsche, by virtue of which Heidegger also 'goes beyond'

Nietzsche, and in which he also stands in relation to Plato, is a motif which recurs throughout

Nietzsche. In Chapter 4, Heidegger writes of the relationship which obtains between

Nietzsche's doctrines of eternal recurrence and will to power: 'Thinking Being, will to power,

as eternal return, thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy, means thinking Being as

Time. Nietzsche thinks that thought but does not think it as the question of Being and Time'

(20). The movement of confrontation here is familiar by now: Heidegger thinks the same

thought as Nietzsche, but asks a different question. But Heidegger qualifies this remark in

order to emphasise both respect for and a shared enterprise with Nietzsche:

If we do ask the question, we do not mean to suggest that we are cleverer than both

Nietzsche and Western philosophy, which Nietzsche "only" thinks to its end. We

know that the most difficult thought of philosophy has only become more difficult,

that the peak of the meditation has not yet been conquered and perhaps not even

discovered at all (20).

A similar remark closes the chapter which immediately precedes Plato's discussion of

mimesis: 'In order to correspond to the mood of this dialogue, we would do well to put aside

for the moment our seemingly greater sagacity and superior air of "knowing all about it

already"' (Ch. 21, 170). Could this gesture be directed at Heidegger's previous work on Plato?

Chapters 5 and 6 of Nietzsche describe in detail the importance of the shared

endeavour between philosophers which is central to their confrontation. The fourth sentence

of Chapter 5 ('Nietzsche's Manner of Thinking as Reversal'), imputes a similar reversal to

pensée, en accord avec Platon (mais selon un mouvement qui le pousse à bout, s'il ne le porte pas

franchement au-delà de lui-meme), comme désinstallation) (250).

 18

Heidegger's own discussion of Nietzsche: 'When we think through Nietzsche's philosophy in

a questioning way […], we advance beyond the basic positions of Nietzsche and of

philosophy prior to him. But such advance only allows us to come back to Nietzsche' (25). In

Ch. 6, in which Heidegger explores the relationship between Nietzsche's concept of the will

and that of the philosophical tradition, he stresses that this does not imply any 'dependence' of

Nietzsche on that tradition:

'Dependence' is not a concept by which we can understand relationships among the

greats. But the small are always dependent on the great; they are "small " precisely

because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what

is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original

manner. […] Because in philosophical thought […] all great thinkers think the same.

Yet this "same" is so essential and so rich that no single thinker exhausts it; each

commits all the others to it all the more strictly (35-36). 22

The same might be said of Heidegger's relationship to Nietzsche (and Plato). 23 It is in the

spirit of this making the same original in confrontation that Heidegger quite explicitly

22Heidegger's category of greatness seems open to question here, because it might be interpreted as

taking greatness to be what makes creative transformation possible, rather than taking creative

transformation as the condition of a differentiated notion of greatness.

23Cf. also Heidegger's remark that although 'the interpretation of Being as will to power remains

Nietzsche's own [my emphasis] […] it is certain that with this interpretation of the Being of beings

Nietzsche advances into the innermost yet broadest circle of Western thought' (Ch. 10, 63). Heidegger

endorses Nietzsche's warning against the belief that 'philosophical thought can dispense with its history

by means of a proclamation' (Ch. 24, 203). His excellent discussion of the affinity between Nietzsche

and Aristotle rightly criticises the sort of analysis which ignores the confrontation between thinkers by

hunting 'for reminiscences, borrowings, and divergences in an extrinsic manner', which is to say in a
 19

rewrites parts of Nietzsche's work, as we saw him do with Plato's above. This is most clearly

in evidence in Heidegger's chapter on 'The Grand Style', at the point at which Heidegger

comments on Nietzsche's equation of the grand style with classical style: 'True, the immediate

sense of Nietzsche's statements seem to speak for such an equation. […] Nietzsche never

expresses himself about it in any other way. For every great thinker always thinks one jump

more originally than he directly speaks. Our interpretation must therefore try to say what was

unsaid by him' (Ch. 17, 134). 24 Saying what was unsaid by him is a form of confrontation,

and Heidegger does this explicitly with Nietzsche just as he does it implicitly with Plato:

'Will to power is never the willing of a particular actual entity. It involves the Being and

essence of being; it is this itself. Therefore we can say that will to power is always essential

will. Although Nietzsche does not formulate it in this way, at bottom that is what he means'

(Ch. 10, 61).

manner which would artificially discriminate points of "agreement" and "disagreement" between them'

(Ch. 10, 65; cf. also Ch. 8, 50). Heidegger demonstrates the affinity between Aristotle and Nietzsche

without losing sight of the origin of Aristotle's inquiry in pre-Socratic philosophy, and without 'asserting

that Nietzsche's doctrine of Being can be interpreted immediately with the help of the Aristotelian

teaching.'

24Lacoue-Labarthe quotes a more developed exposition of this idea from Heidegger's Was Heißt

Denken? (1954) in 'Typographie' 187-188 n 20. It is in this spirit that Heidegger at times "corrects"

Nietzsche's thought: 'But we have to ask whether all these bodily states and the body itself are grasped

in a metaphysically adequate way, so that one may without further ado borrow material from physiology

and biology, as Nietzsche, to his detriment, so often did' (Ch. 8, 45); 'In order to draw near to the

essential will of Nietzsche's thinking, and remain close to it, our thinking must acquire enormous

range, plus the ability to see beyond everything that is fatally contemporary in Nietzsche' (Ch. 17, 127);

and, 'Nietzsche's aesthetic inquiry explodes its own position when it advances to its most far-flung

border' (131).
 20

The full implications of this can only be understood if we ponder the abyssality of

Heidegger's claim that the matter of Nietzsche's thought 'is in itself a confrontation'.25

Nietzsche provides Heidegger with the matrix according to which Heidegger reads him (and

the Plato whom Nietzsche reads, confronts, submits to etc.). In confronting Nietzsche,

Heidegger must read his confrontation with metaphysics and with Plato, and must employ to

do so the strategy of confrontation which he finds in Nietzsche, particularly in Nietzsche's

confrontation with Plato. Nietzsche is, for Heidegger, the thinker of confrontation. Revising

his relationship to Plato from critique to confrontation is thus a structural necessity of

Heidegger's project in Nietzsche. The strategy with which Heidegger confirms Plato's

mimetology in order to demonstrate Nietzsche's submission to Plato, is one which he derives

from his confrontation with Nietzsche.

The confrontation with Plato in which Heidegger confirms his mimetology, is

organised around Heidegger's discussion of the word technè. In Nietzsche, Heidegger rewrites

Plato's concept of technè in such a way as to make it a forerunner of his "own" concept of

poïesis. He first discusses the term in detail in Ch. 13 ('Six Basic Developments in the

History of Aesthetics'). The concept of technè, Heidegger seems at first to argue, emerged

during the second basic development, namely the beginning of aesthetics inaugurated by

Plato, which coincides with the end of great Greek art. Although Nietzsche makes a similar

claim in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), 26 Heidegger is not rehearsing Nietzsche's history of

aesthetics here, but rather giving his own account in order to assess Nietzsche's contribution.

25That abyssality is in itself enough to show the limitations of the reasoning with which McCarren

defends her translation of Auseinandersetzung with 'differential explication'. If the matter of Nietzsche's

thinking is an Auseinandersetzung, how can the term designate the establishment of a 'clarifying

difference between two positions'? "Nietzsche's" "position" is "itself" already an Auseinandersetzung;

its defining characteristic is the relationship in which it stands to Western philosophy.

26Although Nietzsche directs the blame at Socrates rather than Plato.

 21

The status of technè is similar to that of dikè and alètheia in Ch. 21: Heidegger distinguishes

two senses of the term, one its original sense, the other the occultation (instigated by Plato) of

that original sense. The chronology here is ambiguous however, because Heidegger at first

writes that 'With the distinction of hylè-morphè […] a second concept is coupled which

comes to guide all inquiry into art: art is technè' (80), and seems to imply that technè only

appears in the second part of his history. But he writes three paragraphs later that 'With the

emergence of the distinction between matter and form, the essence of technè undergoes an

interpretation in a particular direction; it loses the force of its original, broad significance'

(82).

This remark begins the discussion of aesthetics in particular within the wider

discussion of the second development within which aesthetics first emerges. It begins by

identifying the distinction between matter and form with the Platonic conception of Beings

with regard to their eidos, idea, for which as we have seen already Heidegger (and Nietzsche)

repeatedly take Plato to task. 27 The loss of the original sense of technè is part of the same

movement as the occultation of alètheia by Plato's idealogical metaphysics. 28 So although

technè is introduced in the discussion of the second development, during which the

understanding of technè is impoverished, Heidegger's analysis presupposes a pre-Socratic

technè which retains the fullness of its significance. As is well known, Heidegger describes

his concept of alètheia in part as a return to the pre-Socratic one. This chronological

ambiguity becomes significant when Heidegger renews the discussion of technè in Chs. 21

27Although Heidegger takes Plato to task both for defining Being in terms of form and matter (eidos),

and in terms of outward appearance (idea), we shall examine below (Ch. 2 § 3) Lacoue-Labarthe's

argument that Being can be defined in terms of appearance without being defined in terms of form and

matter, and that Heidegger's own concept of Being also thinks it in terms of appearance.

28The play on words designates of course a philosophy in which man gains access to the logos by

seeing (idein)
 22

and 22, because his reading of Plato's demiurge attributes to him a Heideggerian/pre-Socratic

practice of technè (just as he attributed similar concepts of dikè and alètheia to the

Republic as a whole in Ch. 21).

The first development in the history of aesthetics, during which technè retains its full

sense, is in fact pre-aesthetic (pre-aesthetic and pre-Socratic are two sides of the same coin

for Heidegger). During that period, Greek art was at its peak, but was 'without a

corresponding cognitive-conceptual meditation on it'. The Greeks of that era 'had such an

originally mature and luminous knowledge, such a passion for knowledge, that in their

luminous state of knowing they had no need for "aesthetics"' (80). That is all that Heidegger

says about this period of aesthetics (apart from a perfunctory warning not to misunderstand

his point as arguing that the Greeks of that era engaged with art on a merely sensual or

experiential level, divorced from the intellect). 29 There is no explicit discussion of technè in

the pre-Socratic period in the Nietzsche; the term is only discussed as part of the second. It

could be that technè predates Platonism, and only the concept that 'art is technè' is introduced

with the matter form distinction. This line of enquiry will be held in abeyance for the present,

and does not seem to accord with Heidegger's work, which nowhere suggests that art was

anything other than technè for the pre-Socratics. Heidegger first of all demonstrates that

technè means more than 'handiwork,' or than 'fine art.' He defines it in relation to 'the concept

that properly counters it', namely physis. Physis is more than nature for Heidegger - it is

synonymous with what appears in alètheia: 'For the Greeks, physis is the first and essential

name for beings themselves and as a whole. For them the being [das Seiende] is what

29This remark, as Lacoue-Labarthe points out, poses a problem for Heidegger, who on one hand wants

to argue that art and reflexion on art are mutually exclusive, and on the other that art is not mere

emotionalism, experience, sensuality etc. Lacoue-Labarthe calls Heidegger's belief that great art and

reflexion on art are mutually exclusive naïve ('La vérité sublime' ([1986]) 110-111. Jean-François

Courtine et al. Du Sublime. Paris: Belin, 1988. 97-147).

 23

flourishes on its own, in no way compelled, what rises and comes forward, and what goes

back into itself and passes away. It is the rule that rises and resides in itself' (81). Technè, on

the other hand, names the proper means of knowing truth: 'it always means knowledge, the

disclosing of beings as such, in the manner of a knowing guidance of bringing-forth' (82-83).

We are not however discussing Being (das Sein) here, but beings (die Seienden). And yet the

term could be capitalised in both sentences without any inconsistency with Heidegger's

thought as a whole. Heidegger describes Being as appearing in alètheia in exactly the same

terms as physis. 30 But why then does Heidegger only introduce the term technè

chronologically during the period of its occultation, and why does he not mention it in

relation to the period in which it flourished? This can be understood only if we advance a

more contentious addition to the semantic range of technè, namely Auseinandersetzung:

If man tries to win a foothold and establish himself among the beings (physis) to

which he is exposed, if he proceeds to master beings in this or that way, then his

advance against beings is borne and guided by a knowledge of them. Such knowledge

is called technè. […] For that reason technè is often the word for human knowledge

without qualification. The kind of knowledge which guides and grounds

confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with and mastery over beings […] (81).

Heidegger describes this sense, in which 'new and other beings are expressly produced […] in

addition to and on the basis of other beings that have already come to be (physis)', as a

special sense of the word technè. But the more generalised sense of technè continues the

30Lacoue-Labarthe remarks that the knowledge which Heidegger attributes to the pre-Socratics in the

first part of his history is an 'allusion to the essence of technè which is perfectly transparent' ('La vérité

sublime' 111), writing elsewhere that 'This knowledge [of the pre-Socratics], which renders any

aesthetic useless […] is nothing else […] than tekhnè in its original meaning […]' (Musica Ficta 177-

178/93).
 24

analogy with Auseinandersetzung. The special sense of technè is legitimate because it is a

subset of the wider one: 'the bringing-forth of artworks as well as utensils is an irruption by

the man who knows and who goes forward in the midst of physis and upon its basis.

Nevertheless, such "going forward," thought in Greek fashion, is no kind of attack: it lets

what is already coming to presence arrive' (82). 'Letting what is already coming to presence

arrive' is analogous to the Auseinandersetzung with an author, in which Heidegger says what

is unsaid by him.

Technè and Auseinandersetzung are described here as analogous processes (which

might both be used to translate mimesis: mimesis as representation, and mimesis as

intertextuality). 31 As we saw above, the process of confrontation makes strict chronology

impossible, by producing statements which are both paraphrases of an original position (the

metaphysical Plato) and a rewriting of that position (Heidegger). This scenario is here

complicated by the fact that the - in one sense - post-metaphysical Heidegger identifies his

attempt to delimit metaphysics with the pre-Socratics. Heidegger's confrontation with technè

both reproduces it as "Platonic" and rewrites it as (post-Platonic/pre-Socratic) Heideggerian.

Hence, the decision regarding the relation between the knowledge of the pre-Socratics, and

the knowledge afforded by technè, is undecidable outside the structure of confrontation. Both

31Heidegger's Auseinandersetzung also echoes Aristotle's (iv bc) characterisation of technè: 'art [τεχνη]

in some cases completes [επιτηλει] what nature cannot bring to a finish [απεργασασθαι], and in others

imitates [µιµειται] nature' (Physics II.8, 199a15, 340. Trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye. The

Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. 2 Vols. Princeton and Guildford, Surrey: Princeton

UP, 1984. I, 314-446). The text employed by this translation is that of W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford

Classical Texts, 1950). References to Aristotle are made first to book number, followed by manuscript

reference. Lacoue-Labarthe translates apergasasthai (ergon: a work or oeuvre) with 'effectuer' and

'oeuvrer'; in English, to work, to make into an oeuvre, to bring about etc. ('La césure du spéculatif'

(1978) 54. L'imitation des modernes. Paris: Galilée, 1986. 39-69).

 25

readings are available as possibilities, both the reading of technè as exclusively Platonic

knowledge (which only appears in the second development of Heidegger's history), and what

this reading leaves unsaid about the essence of technè (until Heidegger), i.e. technè's pre-

Socratic sense.

The discussion of technè is postponed until Chapters 21 and 22 (in a similar way to

the discussion of mimesis in the Republic). We are going over familiar Heideggerian ground

only to look at how Heidegger's inflection of technè confirms Plato's mimetology. This

inflection is centered on a remarkable statement on physis, and on the chronology of the loss

of understanding of that concept by the Greeks:

Surely physis still means emergence for Plato, as it does primarily for the first

beginnings of Greek philosophy [my emphasis], emergence in the way a rose

emerges, unfolding itself and showing itself out of itself. But what we call "nature,"

the countryside, nature-out -of-doors, is only a specially delineated sector of nature or

physis in the essential sense: that which of itself unfolds itself in presencing.

Physis is the primordial Greek grounding word [my emphasis] for Being itself, in the

sense of the presence that emerges of itself and so holds sway (Ch. 22, 181).

Although in Ch. 13 Plato was responsible for the loss of the full sense of technè, and for the

misunderstanding of Being, here he shares the meaning of physis with the pre-Socratics. The

insertion (by Heidegger) of physis in its pre-Socratic sense into Plato's Republic is no

different from his insertion of dikè and alètheia in their Heideggerian (and therefore,

according to Heidegger's intention, pre-Socratic) senses. This passage also tells us that physis

is not just beings, but also Being ('the primordial Greek grounding word for Being itself').

Technè, in its original sense, is therefore the knowledge of Being in alètheia. The

implications of this for Plato's craftsman become clear from Heidegger's careful discussion of
 26

the relation between the eidos and the manifold objects of which it is the eidos: 'It is not

merely a matter of positing the Idea, but of finding the approach by which what we encounter

in its manifold particularity is brought together with the unity of its eidos, and by which the

latter is joined to the former, both being established in relation to one another. What is

established, i.e., brought to the proper approach [i.e. by technè?], i.e., located and presented

for the inquiring glance, is not only the Idea but also the manifold of particular items that can

be related to the oneness of its unified outward appearance' (172). What is at issue is the

relation of Being to beings, and Plato(-Heidegger) argues that the oneness of the Idea (Being)

is disclosed in the outward appearance of the many beings which relate to it.

It is on this basis that Heidegger can argue that the craftsman, in the act of building

tools, lets Being disclose itself in alètheia: 'Something produced "is" because the Idea lets it

be seen as such, lets it come to presence in its outward appearance, lets it "be"', and 'What is

manufactured "is" only to the extent that in it, the outward appearance, Being, radiates' (176).

The close discussion of the frame-maker (175), who produces beings which copy the Being

which he cannot produce, sustains the notion of technè as revealing Being. But we should

pause before arguing that Plato has been completely Heideggerianised. Heidegger argues that

Plato still misunderstands (as we saw) the crucial relation between beings and Being in terms

of form and matter; Plato mistakenly defines Being as the unchanging (173) and the single

(184), 32 and the relation between technè and Being as one of imitation. But for all that, the

critique of Plato, which on these counts is identical to the critique which Heidegger

elaborates outside the Nietzsche, is radically changed by the insertion of the

Heideggerian/pre-Socratic concept of physis into Plato's system. Insofar as it is conceived

according to the Platonic misunderstandings just outlined, technè must be understood in its

fallen sense. But Heidegger's technè, as confrontation, reads Plato beyond what is fatefully

32This misunderstanding of Being is closely linked to the fictioning essence of reason, which is

characteristic of the philosophical epoch in which Being is misunderstood ('Typographie' 197-198).

 27

contemporary in him, says what he has left unsaid. If physis must be understood in its pre-

Socratic sense, this leaves open the possibility of reading technè in that sense too. And it is

not difficult to envisage the possibility that the technè in which Being and physis 'appear' is

no different from Heidegger's; the only thing which need be removed, the only fatefully

contemporary thing, is the definition of Being as eidos, as a form which shapes matter, and

outward appearance. 33

Heidegger envisages the possibility of a proximity between his ("his") and Plato's

technè when he analyses the procedure of mutual accommodation between the many

particular things and the oneness of the Idea (this citation follows shortly after the last

citation from page 172):

The essential directive in the procedure is granted by language, through which man

comports himself toward beings in general. In the word, indeed in what is

immediately uttered, both points of view intersect: on the one hand, that concerning

what in each case is immediately addressed, this house, this table, this bedframe; and

on the other hand, that concerning what this particular item in the word is addressed

as - this thing as house, with view to its outward appearance. Only when we read the

statement on method in terms of such an interpretation do we hit upon the full

Platonic sense (172).

Here, Heidegger diverges widely from Plato's view, a divergence which is hidden only by the

fig-leaf 'with view to its outward appearance'. Relating to things with language is not to relate

to them visually. The claim made by Heidegger here is actually up to a point (as we shall see)

a sharp reading of the Cratylus, in which the name discloses the essence of the thing (ta on,

33As we suggested above, and will argue in greater detail below (Ch. 2, § 3), Heidegger shares to a

certain extent the concept of Being as radiance.

 28

das Seiende, in Heidegger's terminology). But that dialogue also argues that things can be

known apart from words, and that this knowledge is superior to the knowledge granted by

language. The whole extract, until the fig-leaf, is almost pure Heidegger, in which is

condensed the enterprise carried out in the essays collected in On the Way to Language

(1954). 34 If technè is the disclosure of Being in alètheia, and if 'the essential directive in this

procedure is granted by language', the step from this reading of Plato to Heidegger's concept

of poetry as technè in its authentic sense is not a big one. 35 Such an interpretation as this one

is even faithful to the "Platonic" reading of Plato, is consonant with the nature of Heidegger's

Auseinandersetzung with Plato. Heidegger's confirmation of Plato's mimetology is made

possible by an Auseinandersetzung with Plato's technè (in which the structure of

Auseinandersetzung is implicit). Heidegger's poetry-technè is derived from Plato's

demiurgical poesis. But by rewriting Plato's Republic into a position which discloses its

possibilities, Heidegger remains faithful to the Platonic text.

In § 1 of this chapter, we will examine, in relation to the Cratylus, the extent to

which Plato suggests possible ways in which language might imitate Being and truth, from

which Heidegger develops his concept of poetry. We will also survey the moments in which

Plato suggests affinities between this use of language and the poetic enterprise, which use of

language is implicitly different from the use of language by the poets which he condemns in

the Republic (and more widely in his dialogues with the Sophists). The analogy between

poetry and philosophy is one which Heidegger also confronts, for he too sees both philosophy

and poetry as attempts to reveal Being in language. That analogy is developed by Plato in the

Laws, and the idealised poet which Heidegger reads from Plato is in fact the poet as namer

and as law giver (the words for law [nomos] and name [onoma] in Greek, as we shall suggest

34Trans. Peter D. Hertz and Joan Stambaugh. New York, Harper and Rowe, 1971.

35This concept of poetry is articulated extensively in the essays collected in Poetry, Language,

Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975.
 29

below, support the affinity we are trying to suggest). Heidegger too, significantly, holds the

term 'law' in an elevated position (see below § 1).

There are different degrees to which language can be said to relate to truth, as there

are different concepts of truth. Certain writers who will be discussed in our introduction

argue that literature can be realistic without relating to any transcendental Being. A pragmatic

realism demands that literature represent reality in a pragmatic way, without copying it in a

strict sense. They posit a relationship between art and truth which on this superficial level is

similar to Heidegger's. But their conception of truth is not metaphysical in Heidegger's sense,

but sees truth as empirical data, or as opinion or cultural traits. It is because of this that they

are able to argue that literary language need not represent reality according to narrow or

empirical criteria, but that it still bears some relation to a more flexibly defined reality. This,

whatever the variations in the techniques by which this relationship is explained, posits a

space for art in relationship to truth, which is defined from the vantage point of philosophy.

The "realists" argue that literary language has a particular space, a space in relation to the

truth, which is granted to them by the philosophical discourse which claims to know this

truth. This is not to argue against that claim (although one all too often can), but merely to

point out that this act of granting art a particular space in relation to the truth is one of the

central components of what defines the aesthetic for Heidegger. The crucial difference

between Heidegger and the "realists" surveyed in our introduction, is that the realists remain

within the aesthetic. Heidegger's iconoclasm goes one step beyond the mimetic aesthetic

realism of which it is the truth.

Returning to Plato, we see that the freedom granted to literary language by the

aesthetic position is in fact the same freedom which Plato identifies as accruing to the

mimetic poet and the Sophist because of their disregard for the truth. This disregard does not

prevent the opinion (doxa) and emotion (epithumia) to which the Sophist appeals, by virtue
 30

of his disregard for the truth, to have some loose relation to the truth compatible with the

"realists" discussed in the introduction. Our discussion of the poet/namer (§ 1) is required to

show that against which Plato defines the mimetic poet. The mimetic poet corresponds to an

aesthetic concept of art which Heidegger opposes to his concept of poïesis-technè. We will

interest ourselves principally in this chapter (and thesis) with the mimetic poet, who is

banished (as a result of the decision which was the starting point for this Exergue) for failing

to possess technè, and to be a namer/law giver. Without wishing to anticipate too much our

discussion of this in the following sections of this chapter, Plato's condemnation of the

mimetic poet also suggests possibilities for him which form the basis of the aesthetic view of

art. These possibilities are granted to him precisely because of his freedom with respect to

representation of reality. There is also (on top of the mimetic poet and the poet-namer) a third

poet in Plato, the inspired poet, who as we shall show, is the redemption of the mimetic poet.

Our discussion will center on how that poet is on one hand the epitome of the aesthetic, and

on the other hand its tragic interruption. The attractions for this thesis of Plato's mimetic and

inspired poets (as opposed to the poet/namer) is that they are ascribed a function that is

different from philosophy. But the function, ascribed to art as its proper function by

philosophy, is as we have seen in one sense the definition of the aesthetic for Heidegger.

What we shall also try to show is that Plato's Phaedrus, ascribes such a function to poetry

(and implicitly to the arts) which exceeds the aesthetic.

The possibilities which exist in Plato's writing for the poet, whether as namer,

mimetès or inspired, should have given Plato pause for thought when expelling him. This

topic has been well trodden, and Plato even acknowledges that the poets might be readmitted

into the polis, should someone find them a role (607 c-d). 36 This chapter will attempt to show

36For other moments in which Plato articulates this ambivalence cf. Republic III 398 a and Laws VII

817 b and IX 858 e. Trans. A. E. Taylor (1934). Collected Dialogues. 1226-1513. Reference also made
 31

that Plato does just that in the Phaedrus. But we will first continue to read the essay in which

Lacoue-Labarthe's questions the finality of Socrates's decision, and in so doing also questions

Heidegger's confirming reading of Plato's gesture. Lacoue-Labarthe in 'Typographie' argues

that Heidegger's valorisation of Plato's demiurge is necessarily accompanied by an

endorsement of Plato's condemnation of representational mimesis. 37 This involves, implicitly,

an acceptance of Plato's redefinition of mimesis in Book X. We are going to examine the

to Les Lois I-IV. Trans. and ed. Edouard des Places. Œuvres complètes de Platon IX i-ii (1951), and

Les Lois VII-X. Trans. and ed. Auguste Diès. Œuvres complètes de Platon XII i (1956).

37This opens up the whole topic of Heidegger's poetics, which we have only been able to outline here,

and which are discussed exhaustively by Lacoue-Labarthe, and others which we will now mention.

Certain readings of poetry which claim inspiration from Heidegger maintain his distinction between

poetry which makes the true Being present in language, and poetry as imitation: James E. Swearingen.

'The Poet and the Phenomenon of World.' Papers on Language and Literature 17:1 (Winter 1981). 62-

71. This distinction in Heidegger, as well as Heidegger's presentation of poetry as the revelation of

Being, are discussed by Timothy Clark: 'Not Motion, but a Mime of It: "Rhythm" in the Textuality of

Heidegger's Work.' Paragraph 9 (March 1987). 69-82, and 'Being in Mime: Heidegger and Derrida on

the Ontology of Literary Language.' 1003-1013. MLN 101:5 (December 1986). 1003-1021. Clark

argues, following Derrida ('La double séance' 219/193) that Heidegger distinguishes between two forms

of language: one which calls being into unconcealedness, the other which represents the being which is

made apparent ('Being and Mime' 1004-1006, 1010, 1012-1013/'Not Motion' 71-72, 75-76). Because

the object which the second form of language represents is only there to be described because of the

first, the second form is dependent on the first. Clark (and Derrida) calls both forms of language

mimesis, but, as we shall see, Heidegger reserves the name of mimesis for the second form, in order to

distinguish it from the first, which he calls technè and Dichtung. This distinction is of course what

Derrida contests by describing both uses of language as mimesis, and we find a similar argument in

Lacoue-Labarthe, in 'Typographie' and in 'La transcendence finie/t dans la politique' ['The Finite

Transcendence in Politics/Transcendence ends up in Politics'] (1981) 163 and 170-171. L'imitation des

Modernes. Paris: Galilée, 1986. 135-171.

 32

manner in which Heidegger's reading of Plato in Nietzsche bases itself exclusively on the

definition of mimesis in Book X, and attempts to place the definition of mimesis in Books II

and III out of bounds. The point of departure for Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis is the absence of

recognition in Heidegger's work of the analogy between Plato's "figural" use of Socrates, and

Nietzsche's "figural" use of Zarathustra (174-190). Lacoue-Labarthe argues that for

Heidegger, the metaphysics of the Gestalt or figure - i.e. the kind of philosophical gesture

which (as Nietzsche's friend Rohde suspected) was shared by Plato and Nietzsche - is

complicitous with the epoch of technique. The epoch of technique corresponds to the second

stage of the history of aesthetics we saw Heidegger outline earlier, in which technè is no

longer understood in its full sense. In this period, technique (in its limited utilitarian sense)

predominates, but the essence of the technè of which it is a derivation is forgotten. The

essence of technè, as Heidegger writes, is not technical (cf. 'Typographie' 184).

But Lacoue-Labarthe points out that, like technè, the Gestalt is not thought through

during the period in which it holds sway. This leads him to a key term of Heidegger's (and of

his): the Ge-stell. 38 Lacoue-Labarthe quotes a passage in Questions, in which Heidegger asks

whether the Gestalt can be derived (both etymologically and conceptually) from Ge-stell.

This may seem at first an arcane and dusty question, but for the fact that the Ge-stell

functions for Heidegger as 'a word for the forgotten/retreating/hidden essence of being'

('Typographie' 185), 39 only if it also denominates the domain from which the Gestalt can be

derived. If the reverse is the case, argues Lacoue-Labarthe, and the Ge-stell is derived from

Gestalt, then the essence of Being would be dependent on the representational and figural

human faculties which determine the Gestalt. That is because, as we have seen, the Gestalt is

38Translated as 'enframing' in Heidegger. 'The Question Concerning Technology' (1949) 21. 'The

Question Concerning Technology' and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland, 1977.

3-35.

39'[u]n mot pour l'essence oubliée/retirée/cachée de l'etre'.

 33

a function of the (Platonic, technical) period in which truth and Being are obscured. Should

that be the case, then the whole Heideggerian enterprise of delimiting subjectival

metaphysics, and instating an adequate thinking of Being in alètheia, would be doomed from

the outset. From this follows a need to subordinate the Gestalt to the Ge-stell, which amounts

to a subordination of the Gestalt to technè. This becomes clearer in relation to another

passage from Heidegger, quoted and translated by Lacoue-Labarthe, which will show the

proximity between Heidegger's alètheia and Plato's:

The word stellen [to set upon] in the name of Ge-stell [Enframing] does not only

mean challenging [das Herausfordern; Lacoue-Labarthe: 'provocation']. At the same

time, it should preserve the suggestion of another Stellen from which it stems,

namely, that producing and presenting [Her- und Dar-stellen] which, in the sense of

poïèsis, lets the present 40 come forth into unconcealment [die Unverborgenheit]. 41

This productive [hervorbringend] Herstellen, 42 e.g. the erecting [das Aufstellen] of a

statue in the temple precinct - and the provocative ordering [das herausfordernde

Bestellen] 43 now under consideration are indeed fundamentally different, and yet

they remain related in their essence. 44

In this passage, Heidegger has implicitly decided that Ge-stell grounds Gestalt. The

provocatory sense of stellen is that of modern technique, which is kindred to the epoch of the

40Lovitt: 'what presences'; Lacoue-Labarthe: 'le présent'.

41Lacoue-Labarthe: 'le dévoilement' ('the unveiling').

42Lovitt: 'This producing that brings forth'; Lacoue-Labarthe: 'Ce Herstellen producteur'.

43Lovitt: 'challenging ordering'; Lacoue-Labarthe: 'le commettre provoquant'.

44Heidegger. 'The Question Concerning Technology' 21; quoted in 'Typographie' 192. I have modified

Lovitt's translation in the light of Lacoue-Labarthe's more literal one.

 34

Gestalt in which Being is misunderstood. The Herstellen and Darstellen from which it is

derived is the poetic act in which Being is unveiled.

This gesture is repeated in the Nietzsche, and organised around the uncharacteristic

translation given there by Heidegger of alètheia as 'Unverstelltheit' (Nietzsche 182;

'Typographie' 207). Lacoue-Labarthe renders 'verstellheit' as dissimulation (191), the central

indictment of mimesis for Plato. The definition of truth as 'Unverstelltheit' in the Nietzsche is

in agreement with its denomination as Ge-stell in Essays. It communicates with a wider

definition of Being as 'stance, stature, station, - as, in "Greek", stase and stèle, which is and

which has always been, in the West, the meaning of Being itself. Being […] means standing

up' (195; cf. also n 33). 45 Alètheia, accordingly, also implies Herstellen, or the installation

which is derived from the original meaning of Ge-stell. 46 Thus, truth as Ge-stell and

Unverstelltheit implies a view of truth as installation and erection, and of erection and

installation as unveiling: 'Because alètheia can be spoken as Unverstelltheit, all installation is

properly an inauguration, the unveiling of a stele or of a statue' (208). 47

45'[U]n sens de l'etre comme stance, stature, station, - comme, en "grec", stase ou stèle, qui est et qui a

toujours été, en Occident, le sens de l'etre lui-meme. Etre […] veut dire se tenir debout.'

46Note that this definition is subordinate to Heidegger's more usual one of alètheia as unveiling: 'The

stele is only a name for truth because truth is unveiling. And not the other way around. Very precisely,

it's not erection which unveils, but unveiling which erects' (La stèle n'est un nom pour la vérité que

parce que la vérité est le dévoilement. Et non l'inverse. Très précisément, ce n'est pas l'érection qui

dévoile, mais le dévoilement qui érige) ('Typographie' 208). Dr. K. Simms has pointed out to me that

this line of thought is also found in Lacan.

47'Parce que l'alètheia peut se dire Unverstelltheit, toute installation est proprement une inauguration, le

dévoilement d'une stèle ou d'une statue.'

 35

The understanding of alètheia as Unverstelltheit, which Heidegger attributes to Plato

in Nietzsche, corresponds too closely to Heidegger's own. In Plato's Doctrine by contrast,

Heidegger describes Plato as inflecting the understanding of alètheia toward its (modern)

provocatory and at the same time fictioning definition. One might at first think that mimesis

in Heidegger's reading of Plato in Nietzsche might designate the Gestalt, or fictioning power,

and that Heidegger is endorsing Plato's subordination of mimesis as Gestalt to the Ge-stell in

its originary sense (as poesis, installation, technè etc.). But the status of the Gestalt in

Heidegger's analysis is more complicated, and entirely different from that of mimesis. The

double meaning of Ge-stell, as both installation and Gestalt, of both a relation of care to

truth, and one of provocation and exploitation (194-195), 'is double only to the extent that the

point is [il s'agit de] to let a deformed echo of Greek production, of poïesis, be heard within

provocation' (196). 48 The Gestalt, although a deformation of the Ge-stell, still retains a link

to it. 49

Lacoue-Labarthe notices (200-01) that Heidegger, in the passage in which he

distinguishes the two meanings of Ge-stell, begins by talking about installation

and representation, but in the next sentence only mentions 'This productive installation …'.

This gesture, writes Lacoue-Labarthe, is repeated in the Nietzsche's translation of alètheia by

Unverstelltheit (and, he might have also said, in the passage from Questions quoted earlier).

This loss of Darstellung is more far reaching than the subordination of Gestalt to Ge-stell.

The term 'loss' ('la perte de la Darstellung') is used by Lacoue-Labarthe (200) to describe the

way Heidegger thinks Gestalt outside of any connection to Darstellung, because that

48'[N]'est double dans la seule mesure où il s'agit de faire entendre dans la provocation un écho déformé

de la production grecque, de la poïesis.'

49As Lacoue-Labarthe shows, when Heidegger opposes the Gestalt to subjectivist aesthetics, he uses the

word Gestalt in a way which retains the original meaning of Ge-stell, which the

gestalterisch metaphysical thinking was responsible for forgetting (Musica Ficta 191-214/101-115).
 36

Darstellung will come back to haunt his analysis. This is due to the fact that - for Heidegger -

the Gestalt has nothing to do with Darstellung, and fiction nothing to do with representation.

This underlies Heidegger's analysis of what he calls 'the fictioning essence of reason' (das

dichtende Wesen der Vernunft). The Gestalt is a product of that essence, and Heidegger

unites Plato and Nietzsche in their belonging to it in his second course of lectures on

Nietzsche. 50 The fictioning essence of reason is intimately connected to the occultation of

truth criticised in Plato by Heidegger: it thinks the essence of being as the Same, or as the

Unchanging, which manifests itself visibly in particular beings (cf. 'Typographie' 197).

Transcendence itself is the product of the fictioning power of human reason, whether it be

thought of as Plato's ideas, Aristotle's categories or the realm of Kant's transcendent faculties

(cf. 198). Nietzsche's Zarathustra is, on that score, "poetic" in the same way as a Platonic

dialogue (cf. 199). 51 But this particular understanding of the poetic has nothing to do with

Darstellung. 52 Darstellung would immediately imply the paradox of representation (and of

mimesis) discussed above (mimesis represents something other than itself, its definition is to

50'Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?', published in Volume I of the German edition and French translation

of Heidegger's Nietzsche, and in Volume II of the English translation of that work.

51A certain recognition of this can already be found in the Zarathustra, when Zarathustra says that gods

are poetical fictions and poetical imitations '[Dichter-Gleichnis; 'tours de poètes']' ('Von den

Dichtern/Des poètes' 274/275. Also Sprach Zarathustra/Ainsi Parlait Zarathustra (1883-1885).

Bilingual ed. Trans. Geneviève Blanquis. Paris: Aubier, 1969. II (1883), 273-277). Cf. also Plotinus's

critique of the fictioning aspect of Plato's concept of the world's creation by the demiurge (On

Intellectual Beauty 7, 1-15). All references to Plotinus (iii ad) are to part and line number only, and all

my paraphrases and translations of On Intellectual Beauty are based on De la beauté intelligible.

Ennéades. Bilingual ed. Trans. and ed. Emile Bréhier. Six vols. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1924-1938. V

(1931) Bk. 8 (135-151). All references to Bréhier's notes are to page number only.

52This, Lacoue-Labarthe remarks, is manifest in the way Heidegger approaches the fictional aspects of

philosophical works such as Nietzsche's by treating them as ornamental, as allegories which must be

translated into their underlying concepts (187-189).

 37

be other than itself) as well as its abyssality (any attempt to describe mimesis must

necessarily employ the very thing which it is describing in order to make the description).

Dichtung can be translated as both poetry and fiction: the dichtende essence of reason is not

poetic in the sense valorised by Heidegger. It is a deforming echo of poesis, just as Gestalt is

of Ge-stell. However, Darstellung is not even such a subordinated term, but rather that which

must be lost in order to maintain the subordination outlined by Heidegger.

Darstellung is what would complicate the subordinations carried out by Plato-

Heidegger. In particular, Lacoue-Labarthe shows that the decision by Socrates to expel the

poets can only be credited with the success which Heidegger (Socrates-Plato-Heidegger)

attributes to it by losing the abyssality of representation. When it comes to mimesis, against

what one might have expected, Heidegger does not "lose" mimesis as that which might have

thrown a spanner in the works of his system, but distinguishes it from Darstellung in order

better to subordinate it. Implicit in Lacoue-Labarthe's reading of Heidegger is the assumption

that mimesis is subordinated to the Gestalt. The Gestalt, as deformed echo of the Ge-stell,

can still be recuperated for the Ge-stell by a confrontational reading, just as Heidegger's

reading of Plato in Nietzsche recuperates his ideo-subjectival understanding of Being by

rewriting it as Heidegger's own. Heidegger thus distinguishes mimesis from both the Gestalt

and Darstellung. It is because mimesis, in Heidegger's account, is not related to Darstellung,

that the "literary" discussion of poetry in Books II and III of the Republic can only prepare (as

we saw above) for the decision regarding poetry (204-205). The essence of poetry for Plato-

Heidegger is not to be found in its literary properties. 53

53To discuss the reading proposed by Heidegger we must again refer to its author as Plato-Heidegger.

(Plato-)Heidegger's reading draws out and emphasises an analysis of mimesis which is unquestionably

"there" in the Republic. But it also (as Lacoue-Labarthe points out), downplays (loses) arguments in the

Republic which do not fit that analysis. But because on one level Heidegger's reading is so close to

Plato's as to almost be a paraphrase, it would be illegitimate to attribute it only to Heidegger.

 38

Heidegger follows Plato's tripartite distinction in Book X between the God, the

demiurge and the mimetès-poet. The God creates physis, or the Being, and the demiurge (as

we saw above) uses technè to let Being appear in particular created beings. The actions of the

mimetès, argues Plato-Heidegger, have nothing to do with Darstellung; he too installs Being

in his imitations. The shift in the sentence from Essais et conférences quoted in 'Typographie'

192, from Ge-stell as Herstellen and Darstellen to just Herstellen corresponds to the reading

in the Nietzsche of mimesis as a mode of installation rather than as Darstellung. 54 Mimesis,

like technè, is installation (according to Heidegger), and only differs from technè because of

the mode according to which it installs (cf. 212-213). Plato-Heidegger argues that while

technè installs truth as stable and upright, mimesis de-installs it as unstable, as lying down. 55

And it is this reading, argues Lacoue-Labarthe, which makes it possible for Heidegger to

underwrite Plato-Heidegger's decision regarding mimesis so confidently:

From there, it's all in the bag. The difference can be made, it is possible to criticise

mimesis, to decide about it. It's even very easy. It is of course necessary to recognise,

as Heidegger says, that here 'Plato is wrestling [ringt] to seize the difference of the

τροποσ', that this does not happen on its own and that he needs to get through the risk

of a dangerous identification between 'good' and 'bad' poïesis, demiurgy and mimesis.

But as Heidegger again immediately recognises, 'the more we seize the identity

54Cf. 'Typographie' 205-214.

55'Mimesis is the decline of alètheia, the "lie down" or the "lay out" of the stele' ('La mimesis est le

déclin de l'alèthéia, le "se coucher" ou le "s'allonger" de la stèle' (214). For a discussion of the way

English poetry exploits the fact that the word 'lie' in English carries both the meaning of 'telling a lie'

(explicitly attributed to mimesis by Plato) and 'lying down' (the definition of mimesis by Plato-

Heidegger), cf. Christopher Ricks. 'Lies' (1975). The Force of Poetry (1984). Oxford: Oxford UP,

1987. 369-391.
 39

precisely, the clearer the difference must become.' In this sort of combat, in this

"ring" […] the adversary is bound to lay itself out in advance. One need merely put a

price on it. It is this way at least when it is Heidegger who speaks through Plato's

mouth - or who rewrites him. (214-215). 56

Heidegger's recasting of Plato's demiurgy as (the deformed echo of) his poesis and technè, is

accompanied by his confirmation of Plato's rejection of mimesis as an inferior variety of

installation of the truth (of relation to the truth). And both gestures are underpinned by the

refusal to consider either technè, Gestalt or mimesis as having anything to do with

Darstellung (and implicitly, the definition of mimesis in Books II and III with that of Book

X). That is why Heidegger passes over in silence the possibility of a relation between

Nietzsche's representation of his philosophy through Zarathustra, and of Plato's through

Socrates.

What Lacoue-Labarthe attempts to demonstrate is that Plato is less sure of himself

"on his own" than he is when Heidegger is speaking through him. This is apparent in

56'De là, tout est acquis. La différence peut se faire, il est possible de critiquer la mimesis, d'en décider.

C'est meme très facile. Sans doute est-il nécessaire de reconnaitre, comme le dit Heidegger, qu'ici

"Platon lutte [ringt] pour saisir la différence du τροποσ", que cela ne se fait pas tout seul et qu'il lui faut

en passer par le risque d'une identification entre 'bonne' et 'mauvaise' poïesis, démiurgie et mimesis.

Mais comme le reconnait encore Heidegger aussitot, "plus nous saisissons précisément l'identité, plus

claire doit se faire la différence." Dans ce genre de combat, sur ce "ring" […], l'adversaire est à l'avance

tenu de s'allonger. Il suffit d'y mettre le prix. Tout au moins en va-t-il ainsi, lorsque c'est Heidegger qui

parle par la bouche de Platon - ou qui le réécrit.' Lacoue-Labarthe quotes here from the French

translation of Nietzsche (163), and as before I have translated the French translation. Krell translates

these sentences respectively as 'Plato here is wrestling with the conception of the varying tropos' and
 40

Heidegger's reading of Plato's discussion of the man with the mirror, which constitutes the

pièce-de-résistance of Lacoue-Labarthe's essay. The mirror of course exemplifies mimetic

installation for Plato-Heidegger; it is an absolutely passive installation of truth, which

requires no true knowledge of its object. In Republic X, after having discussed the kind of

imitation made possible by the mirror, Socrates says 'I suppose that the painter too belongs to

this class of makers' (596 e), which Heidegger translates as 'For I believe that the painter too

belongs to that kind of pro-ducing," which is to say the mirroring kind' (Nietzsche (trans.

Krell) 179). Lacoue-Labarthe notices that the specification of the class of makers to which

the painter is compared is made by Heidegger ('Typographie' 216). He points out that it seems

as though the painter is being compared to the mirror itself, but must in fact be being

compared to the mirror-bearer (otherwise, how would a mirror reflect itself?) (216-217).

There is a problem with this comparison though, because the passivity of the mirror-bearer is

of an entirely different order from that of the painter: while the painter does some devalorised

work, the mirror-bearer's manner of installing is purely passive. 57 And this purely passive

activity, which merely reproduces the activity of others, is what Plato reproaches to mimesis

in its restricted sense in Books II and III (we will discuss this below in § 4). For all its

'The more firmly we hold on to the selfsameness, the more significant the distinction must become'

(178).

57The relation of the painter to the mirror(-bearer) raises in fact the question of the subject (who does

the installing here?) and of work (what work does the mirror(-bearer) do?) which Heidegger attempts to

hold in abeyance by avoiding the Plato : Socrates :: Nietzsche : Zarathustra analogy (cf. 'Typographie'

218). Méchoulan, for all his perceptiveness, does not notice this difference, in an otherwise excellent

analysis of this passage of the Republic ('Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 143/139-140). On the

same page, he also asserts that Plato distinguishes the poet and the demiurge in Republic X by arguing

that the one copies appearance, the other reality, without addressing Heidegger's contrasting argument

(to which he nonetheless alludes three sentences later) that both let the being's appearance show itself,

only in a different manner (Nietzsche Ch. 22, 176-177; cf. 'Typographie' 214).
 41

passivity, Darstellung is an act, whereas the mirror's imitation is merely a product. The

passivity of the mirror-bearer, as opposed to that of the mirror, identifies his actions (contrary

to Heidegger's reading) as Darstellung rather than a (devalorised) installation. The mirror

shows a disinstalled truth, the mirror-bearer represents it.

Plato's ruse is to discuss the mirror carrier as if he were referring to the mirror, which

enables Plato-Heidegger to displace attention from the mirror-bearer's Darstellung to his

mirror's installation (cf. 'Typographie' 218). This trick is set up at the beginning of Book X,

when Socrates begins by talking about the mimetic poet, and switches the discussion to the

question of what mimesis is. This substitution ensures that the discussion stays theoretical, in

the radical sense of 'what can be seen', and it is according to the theoretical premise implicit

in the question 'what is mimesis?' that Plato-Heidegger can present mimesis as disinstallation,

as deformed installation. This substitution corresponds, again, to the substitution of the

definition of mimesis in Book X for that of Books II and III. Lacoue-Labarthe points out that

Heidegger begins his discussion of Republic X at the end of 596 c, when the question 'what is

mimesis?' is raised, leaving out 596 a-c, we must realise that, as we said at the beginning of

this Exergue, Heidegger passes over in silence 58 Plato's reference to the earlier definition of

mimesis in Book III (219). 59

But Lacoue-Labarthe adds another card to this edifice, describing the extra twist

(‘tour de plus’) given by Plato to his decision: he 'puts the theoretical in the abyss' (220). 60

58'Anyway, Heidegger never avoids anything' ('de toutes façons, Heidegger n'évite jamais rien')

('Typographie' 189).

59Lacoue-Labarthe shows that Heidegger's claim that a decision regarding mimesis can only be reached

in Book X after arriving at a definition of dikè is designed to minimise the importance of Books II and

III ('Typographie' 203-205).

60'[O]n met en abyme le théorique lui-meme.'

 42

The mirror is the figure of the theoretical, in which everything can be seen, and according to

which the mirror in its limited sense as (dis)installation can be subordinated to both physis

and technè. But the mirror is also, according to the substitution at the heart of Plato's ruse, a

trope for the mimetès. By representing him with a mirror, Plato's ruse places him in the realm

of the visible, of theory: 'Strange mimetician then: mirrored/iced [glacé], frozen [figé; 'made

into an effigy'], installed - theorised. Made perfectly visible […]. But by this token one holds

him, one has one's eye on him. The mirror is an absolute instrument […]: it's the machine for

turning Medusa to stone [méduser la Méduse] […]' (221). 61 In other words, Socrates is able

to make his decision about the mimetic poet by representing him as/with a mirror. He decides

the fate of mimesis by trumping it (cf. 221-224). The definition of mimesis away from

Darstellung which enables Socrates's decision depends on a Darstellung of the mimetic poet.

While endorsing Plato's ruse, Heidegger also draws attention to it, because he specifies the

mirror carrier as the class of maker to whom the painter is compared, where Plato avoids any

such specification (218). Lacoue-Labarthe is able to seize on this to show that the mirror-

bearer is a function without any specificity, exactly like the mimetic poet-tragedian in Books

II and III, and from there to demonstrate how Darstellung haunts the philosophical gesture

which claims to expel it.

This reading suggests a different way of inflecting Socrates's opening remarks in

Book X. We can see it now as a repetition of the expulsion in Book III, and as an admission

that the argument of the Republic as a whole centers on the expulsion of mimesis (225-227).

This forces us to question the commonplace view that the mirror serves unambiguously in

Plato as a symbol of the unproblematically hierarchical representation of reality (we refer of

61'Etrange miméticien alors: glacé, figé, installé - théorisé. Devenu parfaitement visible […]. Mais du

coup on le tient, on l'a à l'œil. Le mirroir est un instrument absolu […]: c'est l'appareil pour méduser la

Méduse'.
 43

course to Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp. 62 Here is one summary of Plato's theory by

Abrams: 'a mirror-image is only a simulacrum of an object, forced deceptively to represent

three dimensions by two: hence the lowly status of art as mere appearance, far removed from

the truth. Also, the sole function of the mirror is to yield a flawless and accurate image'

(34). 63 Abrams confirms Plato's mimetology, by arguing that the mirror's telos is the perfect

representation of truth, a telos which it cannot, by its very nature as a representation,

achieve. 64 What Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis shows is that the mirror represents the mimetès,

and as such is a figure for the Darstellung which undoes Plato's conceptual hierarchy.

Abrams perpetrates a gross simplification, in attributing to Plato the mirror as the figure for a

concept of art as the simple reflection of reality; he needs to present Plato and the mirror as

unproblematically imitative, in order to contrast them with the Romantics, and their

privileged metaphor the lamp, as unproblematically expressive. 65

62M. H. Abrams. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York:

Oxford UP, 1953.

63Note in passing the non-sequitur of the mirror-image as lowly simulacrum and as flawless image;

Plato in fact rigorously distinguishes these two kinds of image, and Abrams is having his cake and

eating it by arguing that art is both devalorised for not holding a faithful mirror up to nature and by

being considered as an accurate image of the truth.

64This large topos is usefully summarised in Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. 'Cartesian Mirror/Quixotic Web:

Toward a Narrativity of Desire.' Mosaic 26:2 (Spring 1993). 83-110.

65A similar hierarchy can be found in Günther Gebauer and Christoph Wulf. Mimesis: Culture - Art -

Society. Trans. Don Renau. London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995. Mimesis, they

argue, is conceived as imitation (of reality or of artistic rules and canons) until the eighteenth century

(the transformation takes place in Pt. IV: 'From Imitation to the Constitution of a Creative Subject'

(151-216)) and after that as individual creation (until the deconstitution of the subject by Benjamin,

Adorno and Derrida in Pt. VI). One should also mention Harold Bloom's historical division of two

periods in English literature, before and after the flood where it is only after the flood that 'the anxiety

of influence became central to poetic consciousness' (Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence. New
 44

The fact that Book X repeats the expulsion of Book III, and that the argument of the

Republic as a whole may be said to be organised around the expulsion of mimesis, both

neglected by Heidegger, undermine the confidence with which he credits Plato's expulsion.

Lacoue-Labarthe argues that Heidegger's reading, which is centered on Book VII and the

broaching of alètheia in the cave allegory, ignores the relation of mimesis to desire, discussed

by Plato in Books IV and IX. This relation of course brings the discussion to the work of

René Girard (231-248), whose seminal thesis is that desire is constituted by mimetic rivalry

with the Other, and that this generative rivalry constantly threatens social harmony, and is

periodically purged by the expulsion of a scapegoat, arbitrarily chosen. Plato's decision, in

York: Oxford UP, 1973. 11). The flood takes place during the Enlightenment, at roughly the same time

as Abrams's and Gebauer and Wulf's respective watersheds, and Bloom's exemplary modern poet is,

like Abrams's, Wordsworth (Ch. 1, 20; cf. also 22). Although Bloom does not put much weight on the

word (cf. his citation of Lichtenberg at 31), the different relationships between poets which obtain

before and after the flood correspond to certain concepts of mimesis. Before the flood, poets were not

stifled by their predecessors, but were able to imitate them without being crushed by the weight of the

original (I ask the reader to attribute the jejune vocabulary of this sentence on the weighty influence of

the ancestor book it describes, rebels against, and asserts priority over); after the flood, the poet can

only assert himself by overthrowing his ancestors and obtaining priority over them. Bloom, like Abrams

and Gebauer and Wulf, opposes original creation to imitation. And the reason for positing such a

watershed given by Bloom accepts uncritically the (Romantic) distinction between Romantic and Pre-

Romantic poetry which underlies The Mirror and the Lamp: 'As poetry has become more subjective, the

shadow cast by the precursors has become more dominant' (11; my emphasis). The simplification which

attends the positing of a watershed between imitation and creation by Gebauer and Wulf is usefully

critiqued in Arne Melberg. Theories of Mimesis. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. Intro. 2-3, and, in relation to

Anxiety, in Ralph Pite's The Circle of Our Vision. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Intro., 4-7, 8, 11-12. The

Mirror and the Lamp's thesis has recently been the object of a sustained critique in Robert J. Griffin.

Wordsworth's Pope: a study in literary historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

 45

the Republic, is a representative imitation of just such an arbitrary expulsion. Girard criticises

Plato for attempting to decide about mimesis according to a mimetic model, and argues that

the expulsion of the scapegoat (in Plato's case, the poet), never cures the underlying ill. As

mimetic rivalry begins anew to fracture society, Girard argues, a new scapegoat will have to

be found and expelled, and so on ad infinitum (cf. 'Typographie' 234-235).

In one sense then, Lacoue-Labarthe and Girard occupy similar positions on this

score: both dispute the finality of Socrates's decision. But this gesture in Girard is

accompanied by a summary identification of Socrates to the tragic hero, and of the relation

between Plato and Socrates to that of Sophocles and Oedipus. Socrates (Girard is thinking

here of course particularly of the Apology, Crito and Phaedo in particular) is, like the poet, a

sacrificial victim for the city. Plato's writing of Socrates, like his writing of the poet, is

motivated by the very mimetic rivalry which he attempts to expel with the poets. And it is the

summary symbolic decoding of Plato's figures by Girard which underpin this reading, just as

Heidegger's hurried identification of Socrates with Plato underpins his (in another sense

opposite) reading. Girard, by virtue of these identifications presents Plato as deciding about

mimesis according to a model which he does not understand and which masters him. The

only way to break away from this mastery is (according to Girard) to understand the

sacrificial rite constituted by Plato's writing as the repetition of an original real sacrifice.

Once the foundations of mimetic violence are revealed, it becomes possible to renounce it.

This decision, for Girard, is accomplished by Christ. But for this to be possible, the

crucifixion must be without analogy, without any relation to mimeticism or ritual. Girard's

thesis, while identifying the assertion of difference as engendering the mimetic rivalry which

destroys society, is based on the absolute difference between the crucifixion and any other

sacrifice; it grounds its criticism of Plato's decision about mimesis on the possibility of

refusing mimesis. This all presupposes the possibility of a mimetic desire which precedes and

underlies the sort of (representational, violent, ritual) mimetic desire condemned by Girard
 46

(cf. 'Typographie' 241-242). It is at this point that Lacoue-Labarthe decisively demarcates his

analysis from Girards'. He does so by attempting to think representation as repetition, outside

of the theoretical and visual parameters within which it is addressed by Girard. Girard refuses

to envisage that toward which his thought points, namely the admission that 'representation -

that is to say repetition - is "originary"' (243). 66

It is at this point that something like Lacoue-Labarthe's own position begins to

become articulated (I say 'something like', because this position is in no sense to be thought

"proper" to Lacoue-Labarthe, but of course derives from his reading of Girard and Heidegger

etc. 67). And it is at this point that we, while benefiting from the rigorous, imaginative and

quite brilliant reading work carried out by Lacoue-Labarthe, will also mark our own distance.

The nerve of his argument is a development of his assertion that mimesis is originary, and

appears after Lacoue-Labarthe has concluded his analysis of Girard by tracing anticipations

of that idea in Nietzsche and Freud. After marking a pause in his reading, Lacoue-Labarthe

writes that it leads to the suspicion that 'nothing resembles mimesis more than alètheia' (248).

Mimesis, as described by Lacoue-Labarthe, as that originary non-self-identity, as the thing

whose proper is to be improper, actually resembles Heidegger's alètheia, which is always in

retreat, whose identity can never be grasped. Such a gesture is the deconstructive gesture par

excellence, and underlies, in one form or another, all acts of deconstruction. Like these other

acts, it reverses the traditional hierarchy of truth and representation, making an originary

representation the condition of possibility for the truth. This insight, Lacoue-Labarthe argues,

is already at work in Plato: 'mimesis, as Plato experiences/endures it (but not necessarily as

he thinks it, even though he "theorises" it), obliges one to suppose that something commands

66'[L]a représentation - c'est-à-dire la répétition - est "originaire".'

67Cf. in particular 249-251.

 47

or precedes alètheia itself, or, more exactly, de-stabilises alètheia' (251). 68 This discovery

communicates with the deconstructive assessment of the relationship between literature and

philosophy, as it has been "thought" by philosophy. The texts which immediately spring to

mind here both concern Plato, namely 'Plato's Pharmacy' and 'The Double Session' by Jacques

Derrida. 69 In the two Derrida essays as well as in 'Typographie', the constitutional

undecidability identified by (Plato's) philosophy in literature (as mimesis or as the

pharmakon) is shown to determine the philosophy which devalorises them. The

deconstructive gesture makes philosophy subject to writing, différance, the margin the trace

etc., which philosophy attempts to exclude from (or reappropriate into) its practice.

This analysis is correct, and no attempt will be made to contest it on essentials. But

(as we shall see with Lacoue-Labarthe), such an analysis tends to blur the distinction between

literary Darstellung and philosophy. The critique of the aesthetic, carried out by Heidegger

and developed by Lacoue-Labarthe, aims at a definition of art as auxiliary to philosophy, a

sensuous presentation of what the philosopher arrives at by reasoning. Is there not a danger in

the subordination of both rhetoric and dialectic to writing in its generalised sense, that artistic

Darstellung might be aestheticised, and relegated to the place where différance was first

thought? We see this threat in Lacoue-Labarthe's return to the Republic, in which he reads

Plato's experience of the possibility that mimesis might precede alètheia. Lacoue-Labarthe

shows that Plato's condemnation of mimesis in the Republic is organised around a

condemnation of anything which undermines the subject as unitary, be it the transgression of

professional boundaries and the economics required to satisfy sensual desires (254-255), be it

the fact that the stories told by women to educate their children are imprinted on the latter's

68'[L]a mimesis, telle que Platon en fait l'épreuve (mais non forcément la pense, quand bien meme il la

"théorise"), oblige à supposer que quelque chose commande ou précède l'alèthéia elle-meme, ou, plus

exactement, dé-stabilise l'atlèhéia [sic]'.

69Both in La dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972, and cited below.

 48

malleable personality, and thereby interrupt the speculative dream of the (male) subject

theorising his own conception, engendering himself (256-262), be it the fact that in Plato's

restricted definition of mimesis (as opposed to diegesis) the poet does not speak in his own

name (263-268).

We will return to these motifs in more detail in § 4 of this chapter. The point to be

made here is that deconstruction has been opposed to the attempts by philosophy to constitute

the unitary subject (including the subject of speculative philosophy who 'thinks his other'), 70

a subject (de-)constituted by writing, which is to say, by the Other as absolutely other. 71 This

is also a defining characteristic, for philosophy, of literature as mimesis and/or inspiration.

The result of the deconstruction of the unitary subject of philosophy accomplishes the project

previously assigned to literature. That for which literature had been praised and blamed is

identified as a necessary effect of writing in its generalised sense. What this chapter will

attempt to show is that Plato's condemnation of poetry in the Republic (together with its

resonances in the anti-sophistical dialogues) suggest possibilities for the poet which accrue to

him by virtue of his exclusion from the politeia. In the Phaedrus, precisely those aspects of

writing and of inspiration which deconstitute the subject are presented, in an implicit way

which must be brought out by critical reading, as a positive function of poetry. Heidegger's

chapter on the Phaedrus argues that the dialogue ascribes a mediatory function to art: art

leads from the supersensual to the truth. Our analysis will attempt to read the Phaedrus in a

different way, outside of the aesthetic. Curiously, Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis also downplays

the Phaedrus. He cites, without critique, Heidegger's assertion that the myths in the dialogue

are part of the fictioning essence of reason (198-199), and repeatedly assents to Heidegger's

localisation of the problem of mimesis in the Republic, rather than in the Phaedrus (201, 205

70 'Tympan' x.

71This is the constant theme of the essays collected in Derrida. L'écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil,

1967/Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London and Henley: Routledge, 1978.
 49

n 48). 72 Without wishing to call into question the commanding position of différance which

Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida rightly show to be the condition of possibility of both literary

and philosophical writing, I want to use the Phaedrus to outline a distinct role for literature,

within the ambit of a generalised writing but outside of any aesthetics.

1. The Name of the Law

This section proposes to examine Plato's analysis of how language can imitate reality in an

adequate manner. We will look at the Cratylus, where Plato argues that language is a kind of

craft, and that it is therefore capable of revealing the Being of beings in the same way as the

demiurge in the Republic. The Laws describe the text of the Laws as a tragic poem and an

imitation of life, superior to poetic creation. Moreover, the name giver in the Cratylus is

called a 'legislator' (nomothetès), explicitly bringing out the etymological connection between

name (onoma) and law (nomos) in Greek. We find in this connection an anticipation of

Heidegger's concept of poetry (Dichtung) as craft (technè) and law (Gesetz). But these texts

also suggest wider possibilities for language to imitate reality, which are developed along

more pragmatic lines by subsequent writers.

In order to appreciate the complexity of mimesis in the Platonic text, we need to

revisit the familiar premises of his definition of the poet's imitation as an imitation of an

imitation. The objects the poet imitates are themselves imitations of ideal objects or forms.

[Socrates.] There are many beds and tables.

[Glaucon.] Of course.

72Having alluded to the other dialogues in which Plato attempts to decide again about mimesis, Lacoue-

Labarthe writes 'but let's stay with the Republic' ('mais restons-en à la République') (225).
 50

But there are only two forms of such furniture, one of the bed and one of the

table.

Yes.

And don't we also customarily say that their makers look towards the

appropriate form in making beds or tables we use, and similarly in the other cases?

Surely no craftsman makes [δηµιουργει] the form itself [ιδεαν αυτην]? (Republic X,

596 c). 73

The first point to be made about Plato's tripartite division is that ideal form of which the

object is a copy is characterised by its singularity. The maker of the form could not make two

forms '[b]ecause, if he made only two, then again one would come to light whose form they

in turn would both possess, and that would be the one that is the being of a bed and not the

other two' (597 c). Although this point seems to beg the question, it may be interesting to

consider the logic underlying it. The two forms which are the object of Socrates's hypothesis

must be different from one another, otherwise the second would be redundant as a model. To

copy the original perfectly would be to duplicate it, which is a possibility discounted by Plato

(this is a curious gesture). 74 The two forms would therefore have to be similar but not

identical, and a new single form would have to arise of which they were copies. A similar

situation obtains with the sticks and stones Socrates discusses in the Phaedo.

[Socrates]. Is it not true that equal stones and sticks sometimes, without changing in

themselves, appear equal to one person and unequal to another?

[Simmias]. Certainly.

73Cf. Méchoulan, 'Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 142/138.

74Heidegger argues that the singularity of the form is grounded for Plato in the act of the creator

(phythourgos), but that this leaves the question unanswered (Nietzsche Ch. 22, 183-184).
 51

Well, now, have you ever thought that things which were absolutely equal

were unequal, or that equality was inequality?

No, never, Socrates.

Then these things are not the same as absolute equality. 75

The condition of the simultaneous difference and similarity between the two forms envisaged

in the Republic, according to this logic, is their difference from and similarity to another

form, of which they become imitations. Phaedo's reformulation of Socrates's argument shows

that the two forms whose existence Plato describes as impossible are impossible because they

would be similar to objects of sense: 'So before we begin to see and hear and use our other

senses we must somewhere have acquired the knowledge that there is such a thing as absolute

equality. Otherwise we could never have realised, by using it as a standard of comparison,

that all equal objects of sense are desirous [προθυµεται] of being like it [τοιαυτ' ειναι], but

only imperfect [πεφυκα]' (Phaedo 75 b). 76 Difference from the ideal form is the condition of

the possibility of similarity to it. Sensual objects all resemble the ideal form of which they are

copies because they can never be identical with it. The objects copied by the poet in the

Republic are copies, just like all sensual objects, because all ideal models are necessarily

singular.

The second point to be made is that the singularity of the forms is intrinsically

connected to their perfection. The forms, be they the ideal bed or the absolute equality,

represent the perfect model toward which all their imitations strive. The logical outcome of

this is that all imitations must be imperfect, as Socrates makes explicit in the Cratylus.

75Phaedo 74 b-c. Trans. Hugh Tredennick (1954). The Collected Dialogues of Plato. 40-98.

76Trans. modified. Tredennick gives 'imperfect copies', but there is no word for copies in the original.
 52

Socrates. The image, if expressing [δ'εικαζει] in every point the entire reality

[δεη παντα αποδυναι οιον εστιν], would no longer be an image [εικων]. Let us

suppose the existence of two objects [πραγµατα]. One of them shall be Cratylus, and

the other the image [εικων] of Cratylus, and we will suppose, further, that some god

makes not only a representation [απεικασειν] such as a painter would

[ωσπερ οι ζωγραφοι] make of your outward form and color, but also creates

[ποιησειεν] an inward organisation like yours [εντοσ παντα τοιαυτα], having the

same warmth and softness, and into this infuses motion, and soul, and mind

[φρονησιν], such as you have, and in a word copies 77 all your qualities, and places

them by you in another form. Would you say that this was Cratylus and the image

[εικων] of Cratylus, or that there were two Cratyluses?

Cratylus. I should say that there were two Cratyluses. 78

The craftsman's imitations are imitations of a necessarily single form, which because of this

will always be inferior to it. Now one could argue against this by saying, for example, that

each object existed in its own right, and was not an imitation of anything. The answers,

implicit in Plato's work are twofold (and correspond neatly to the definitions of mimesis in

Books II and III and Book X of the Republic). 1. Things are imitations of other things

(whether of forms in the case of objects, or representations of objects) because, temporally,

they come after the perfect ideal form of which they are the imitation. 2. Imitations set out

deliberately to resemble their models, that is their raison d'etre. As entities in their own right

they have no purpose. In answer 1., we have the hidden premise at work in the Cratylus and

the Republic X: any attempt to posit an origin of which all non-originary things are copies,

77There is no equivalent for this in the Greek.

78Cratylus 432 b-c. Trans. Benjamin Jowett (1871). Collected Dialogues. 421-474. Reference also

made to Cratyle. Trans. and ed. Louis Méridier. Œuvres complètes de Platon V ii (1931).
 53

presupposes a temporal origin, undivided by the différance of time. 79 The second answer

grounds Plato's condemnation of mimicry, particularly in Books II and III of the Republic.

The condemnation of mimesis is not for its distance to the truth, but for its proximity, its

ability to deceive. This will be discussed more thoroughly in § 4. It is the premises in answer

2. which Plato-Heidegger attempts to dissociate from those of answer 1.

Plato's devalorisation of the image also corresponds to the logocentric hierarchy in

which the senses are an inferior exteriorised version of the supersensible. The first imitation

Plato refers to in articulating his banishment of poetry is an imitation of an imitation: poetry

imitates an inferior sensible representation (things) of an intelligible perfection (ideas). There

are of course parallels between this relation and the relation between image and original

suggested by Socrates in the passage from the Cratylus we have just cited. To be an image,

the image must not have the qualities by virtue of which the representation of Cratylus would

be another Cratylus in Socrates's account: inward organisation, warmth, motion, soul and

mind. The mention of inward organisation is not a chance one, but points to the definition in

the Platonic text of the image as lying outside of the model, being an exteriorisation of the

model. Further, the image is characterised as lifeless and dependent, like the body without a

soul; it relates to the original like the sensible does to the intelligible. This concept of

language is the familiar logocentric one discussed by Derrida in grammatologie and 'Plato's

Pharmacy'. 80 The poet's imitation, in language, is at a further remove from the form,

considered as the inside, the truth and life.

79For a short discussion of Heidegger's concept of time, and how it might rewrite the timeless forms

which underpin the part of Plato's mimetology we are now discussing, see Karl Simms. 'The Time of

Deconstruction and the Deconstruction of Time.' Imprimatur 1:2-3 (1996). 194-199.

80Derrida. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967/ Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974, and 'La pharmacie de Platon'.
 54

But all imitations, as we have just shown, are inferior to their models in Plato's

account. The poet's imitation in the Republic can not therefore be devalorised merely by

virtue of being an imitation. In the Cratylus, we discover that Plato does not devalorise all

imitations in language in the way he devalorises the poet's in the Republic, and shows that,

when used correctly, language can be a kind of technè. Socrates disputes Hermogenes's claim

that language is conventional - 'a portion of the human voice that men agree to use'

(Cratylus 383 a) - by arguing in the first instance that 'things [πραγµατα] are not relative to

individuals, and […] must be supposed to have their own proper and permanent essence

[ουσια]' (386 d). 81 Socrates then argues that the actions which proceed from things are as real

as the things themselves, and therefore 'also are done according to their proper nature

[πεφυκα], and not according to our opinion [δοξαν] of them' (386 e - 387 a). Now, language is

an action says Socrates (387 b), and this implies that names are related to the things they

name like a particular action to the object which it affects. The examples used by Socrates are

cutting and burning: naming is to the thing named what cutting is to the object cut. And the

name is an instrument according to this analogy (388 a). From this it follows that there is a

right and a wrong way of naming just as there is a right and a wrong way of cutting: to call

something by the wrong name would be like cutting something with a blunt instrument (387

a). Language is thus analogous to craft, and 'the successful speaker' will be 'he who speaks in

the natural way of speaking, and as things ought to be spoken, and with the natural

instrument' and 'Any other mode of speaking will result in error and failure' (387 c). The aim

of this craft is specified by Socrates as 'teaching [διδασκαλιον] and distinguishing natures

[διακριτον τησ ουσιασ]' (388 c): language is an instrument [οργανον] which reveals the

essence of things, or, in a later formulation, 'shows what beings are

[οιον εκαστον εστι των οντων]' (422 d; my translation).

81Earlier, Socrates asks Hermogenes both whether he thinks that 'being [τα ον; Jowett misleadingly

translates both onta and pragmata with 'things'] differs as its names differ', and whether he thinks that

'things [πραγµατα] are to me as they appear to me [εµοι φαινηται]' (386 a).

 55

Socrates evaluates the accuracy of the craftsmanship of each word by reference to its

derivation, until he is asked to justify the fitness of the words from which the words he has

just explained are derived. His answer is that these words, which he calls 'primary elements

[στοιχεια οντα]' (422 b), 82 are imitations of the things they designate.

Socrates arrives at this point by asking how someone who could not speak would

communicate.

Socrates. Suppose that we had no voice or tongue, and wanted to communicate with

one another. Should we not, like the deaf and dumb, make signs [σηµαινειν] with the

hands and head and the rest of the body?

Hermogenes. There would be no choice, Socrates.

Socrates. We would imitate [µιµουµενοι] the nature of the thing

[την φυσιν του πραγµατοσ] […] (Cratylus 422 e - 423 a).

Direct imitation of the thing named by means of cries and gestures supplements the absence

of language in its usual and more restricted sense. But although this primitive form of

imitation is used as a model to justify and explain Socrates's argument that primary elements

imitate the objects they name, he denies that names work according to this principle. The

primitive imitation by signs does not imitate the essence (ousia) of the thing, but its nature

(phusin) (this crucial point is lost by Jowett's translation of both phusis and ousia with

'nature'). If it did, 'we sh[ould] be obliged to admit that the people who imitate sheep, or

cocks, or other animals, name [ονοµαζειν] that which they imitate [µιµουνται]' (423 b-c). The

imitation of animals described here is analogous to the poet's mimicry as described in

Republic II and II. Socrates is attempting to distinguish naming from poetic mimesis. Socrates

82Méridier: 'les noms sur lesquels porte en ce moment ta question sont-ils élémentaires?'
 56

answers Hermogenes's question, 'what sort of an imitation is a name?' (423 c), by operating a

supplementary exclusion:

Socrates. In the first place, I should reply, not a musical imitation, although that is

also vocal, nor, again, an imitation of what music [µουσικη] imitates; these, in my

judgement, would not be naming. Let me put the matter as follows. All objects have

sound and figure, and many have color?

Hermogenes. Certainly.

Socrates. But the art of naming appears not to be concerned with

imitations of this kind (423 d-e).

The kinds of imitation from which naming is excluded, although disparate, have a number of

important features in common. They are all sensible imitations, and work by an appeal to the

senses. And the imitation of sound and figure as an imitation of the sensual being of the thing

imitated. Socrates also opposes ideal naming to the imitation of animals, and imitating in the

manner of animals.83 Throughout Plato's work, animals are inherently different from and

inferior to men because they lack reason. And the imitation condemned by Socrates is limited

to imitating the sounds the animals make. It thus imitates the part of the animal which is only

different from man in degree: had it imitated the essence of the animal, man's distinction, as a

being possessing logos, from the animal, would have been maintained. In imitating an animal

by reference to its cries rather than its essence, the imitator risks becoming contaminated by

the thing he imitates. This latent possibility is born out when Socrates gives a more precise

definition of that which he opposes to imitation by gesture, color and music:

83Cf. Republic III, 396 b, in which mimesis is condemned as leading to bestiality, and commentary in

Arne Melberg, 'Plato's "Mimesis"' 19. Theories of Mimesis 10-50.

 57

Socrates. Again, is there not an essence of each thing, just as there is a color, or

sound? And is there not an essence [ουσια] of color and sound as well as of anything

else which may be said to have an essence?

Hermogenes. I should think so.

Socrates. Well, and if anyone should imitate [µιµεισθαι; trans. modified] the

essence of each thing [εκαστου ουσιαν] in letters [γραµµασι] and syllables, would he

not express [δηλοι] the nature of each thing [εκαστον ο εστιν]?84

Hermogenes. Quite so.

Socrates. The musician and the painter were the two names which you gave

to the two other imitators. What will this imitator be called?

Hermogenes. I imagine, Socrates, that he must be the namer, or name giver

[ονοµαστικοσ],85 of whom we are in search (423 e - 424 a).

The namer uses letters and syllables to imitate the essence of the thing, as opposed to the two

other imitations which imitate its outward appearance - color, sound, figure etc. Although all

imitations are inferior to their models, naming is defined as an imitation closer to the

intelligible truth than the other imitations.

But at the same time, this superior imitation is defined by comparison with the

inferior one from which it is distinguished; the sensible imitation serves as model for the

intelligible, just as earlier the primitive imitation served as model for the more advanced.

Socrates further analyses 'whether the namer has grasped being [οντοσ] in letters [γραµµασι]

84Méridier's translation is usually superior to Jowett's, as it is here: 'ferait-on voire chaque chose dans sa

réalité'.

85Méridier: 'Un homme capable de dénommer'. Onomastikos literally means 'good or skilled at naming';

a colloquial translation might be 'canny namer'.

 58

and syllables in such a manner as to imitate the essence [αποµιµεισθαι την ουσιαν] or not'

(424 a-b; trans. modified),86 by comparison with music and painting:

Socrates. Imitation of the essence [µιµεσισ τυγχανει ουσα τησ ουσιασ] is made by

syllables and letters [γραµµασιν]. Ought we not, therefore, first to separate the

primary elements [διελησθαι τα στοιχεια],87 just as those who are beginning rhythm

first distinguish the powers of elementary and then of syllables [συλαβων],88 and

[then] proceed to the consideration of rhythms?

Hermogenes. Yes.

Socrates. Must we not begin in the same way 89 - first separating the vowels,

and then the consonants and mutes, into classes [ειδη], […] and distinguishing

[διαφορα] into classes the vowels themselves (424 b-d; my emphasis, trans.

modified).

So although naming is a superior imitation to painting and music, it proceeds in a way

analogous to them. And the principle according to which naming can be compared to music

and painting is the same as that according to which it can imitate the object it names. Plato

posits a natural relationship between the things named and the letters: 'No more could names

ever resemble [οιµαι] any actual thing [γενοιτο ουδενι], unless the original elements of which

86Méridier: 'l'auteur se saisit de leur etre'.

87Jowett translates both grammasin and stoicheia with 'letters', but 'letters' is a misleading translation of

stoicheia, which refers to the 'primary elements' introduced at 422 b. Stoicheios refers to primary

names, and to the elements of which they are composed. Méridier consistently translates with the more

accurate 'éléments'.

88Jowett translates with 'compound sounds', Méridier, more accurately, with 'syllabes'.

89Jowett (unlike Méridier) here adds the specification 'with letters', for which there is no counterpart in

the text.
 59

they are compounded [υπαρξει … συντιθεται τα ονοµατα] bore some degree of resemblance

to the objects [εκεινα πρωτον οµοιοτητα τινα εχοντα] of which the names are the imitation

[εκεινοισ ων εστι τα ονοµατα µιµηµατα]' (434 b).

But Plato analyses this relationship by classifying both letters and things.

And when we have perfected the classification of things [τα ον], we shall give their

names, and see whether, as in the case of primary elements [στοιχεια], there are any

classes to which they may be all referred, and hence we shall see their natures

[ων εστιν ιδειν αυτα τε και ει εν αυτοισ εστιν],90 and see, too, whether they have in

them classes [ειδη] as there are in primary elements [στοιχειοισ]. And when we have

considered all this, we shall know how to apply them to what they resemble

[εκαστου κατα την οµοιοτητα], whether one [εν]91 is used to denote one thing, or

whether there be an admixture of several of them for one object,92 just as, in

painting, the painter who wants to depict anything sometimes uses purple only, or

any other color [φαρµακων], and sometimes mixes up several colors, as his method is

when he has to paint flesh color or anything of that kind - he uses his colors

[εκαστου φαρµακου] as his images appear to require them [εκαστη η εικων].93 And

so, too, we shall apply primary elements to objects [στοιχεια επι τα πραγµατα],94

90Méridier: 'les voire en eux-memes'.

91Jowett specifies 'one letter', but what Plato refers to is the primary element.

92Jowett does not give 'for one object'; Méridier gives 'qu'il faille en attribuer un seul à un seul objet, ou

en mélanger plusieurs pour un objet unique'.

93Jowett translates eikohn here with 'figures', the same word he uses to translate zohon below.

94Jowett translates with 'apply letters to the expression of objects'. But 'expression of' has no foundation

in the text, and is pure interpolation on the translator's part. Méridier gives 'nous appliquerons […] les

éléments aux choses'.

 60

either single ones to single ones [εν επι εν]95 when required, or several letters, and so

we shall form syllables […] and from syllables make [συντιθενται]96 nouns and

verbs, and thus […] arrive at language, large, fair and whole. And as the painter

[γραφικη] made a figure [ζωον], even so shall we make speech [λογον] by the art of

the namer [ονοµαστικην] or the rhetorician, or by some other art [τεχνη] (424 d - 425

a; my emphasis, trans. of stoicheia modified as before).

By separating the letters, language is divided into its constituent parts, which can be

combined into discrete entities such as syllables and words. And, either 'one element is used

to denote one thing', or they are combined into a word to denote a compound thing

considered as a unit. Now, it could be argued that elements denote objects without reference

to this classification, and that classification is merely used to explain it retrospectively. But

logically implicit in Plato's description is that these units signify different objects by virtue of

their difference from one another: it is only because one letter does not denote the same thing

as another that it can denote the particular thing which it imitates. And, crucially, this

differential structure is not restricted to language: things, like names, must also be classified

into discrete units. The thing imitated is already organised within a differential linguistic

system before language is used to denote it. Without needing to be explicitly stated by

Socrates, the inescapable implication of this is that language does not refer to the thing it

imitates, but its classification. And, likewise, music and art are also themselves already

languages. Plato posits a relationship between language and the thing it names, defined by its

difference from other things. Implicitly, in his account, things do not exist outside of the

language to which they are opposed.97

95Jowett reads 'single letters'.

96Méridier: 'composer'.

97Gérard Genette opposes Socrates's argument in the Cratylus to 'Saussure's affirmation of the

arbitrariness of the sign' (Gérard Genette. 'Valéry and the Poetics of Language' (1972). Trans. Josué V.
 61

What this implies is that Plato can posit an imitation of the essence of a being by

language only by making that being analogous to language, or undermining its opposition to

language as something extra-linguistic. Naming is an imitation superior to the sensible

imitation of the outward appearance of a thing (by music, painting, or animal cries) because it

is an imitation of that thing's intelligible essence. It is thus possible to imitate an ideal object

in words directly, without (like the poet) imitating a sensible object (which is already an

imitation of the ideal one). As we have seen, the fact that all sensible objects are copies of

ideal ones makes all things in the actual world an inferior supplement to ideal ones. But

within this structure there is the possibility of good supplements and bad ones, of

technè (things, names) and mimesis. The good supplement imitates the essence of things, the

bad their sensible appearances (or, for Heidegger, disinstalls their appearance). But, as we

have shown, this imitation of the intelligible essence is made possible by the presence of a

differential linguistic structure in the thing named before its denotation by language. The

relevance of this point to our argument is that Plato's attempt to establish the possibility of a

good supplement effaces its supplementarity. However, this conclusion is consonant only

with Plato's description of language. The conclusions he draws from his description are

Harari. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in post-structuralist criticism. Ed. Josué V. Harari. London:

Methuen, 1980. 359-373). Without disputing the accuracy of Genette's remark, or denying the essential

difference between Plato's nominative and Saussure's conventionalist views of language, what our

analysis allows us to see is that Socrates's claim that words are not arbitrary is underwritten by a

description of the sign (and its referent) as defined only by its (their) position within a differential

structure. Joseph Graham in a recent book argues that Cratylus represents an extreme nominative view

of language, and Hermogenes an extreme view of the signifier as arbitrary. If either were right about

language, he argues, neither would be able to understand the other with it. Socrates makes the debate

possible by adopting a middle position in which words are both imitative and conventional (Joseph F.

Graham. 'Philosophy in the Cratylus.' Onomatopoetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Ch. 1, 1-39).
 62

radically different, and attempt to present the essence of the thing named as intrinsically

different from the language that names it. Plato's attempt to claim that language and the

things denoted by it are intrinsically different is an attempt to preserve the possibility of

language being a supplement, and thereby the possibility of a good supplement.

To examine this issue, we must look again at the relationship between naming and

craft. The analogies between them should be obvious here: both are imitations of the

intelligible form of an object. The word 'chair' can be considered as an imitation of the ideal

chair in language, on a par with its imitation by the craftsman using wood.98 But a further

complication should be taken into account here:

As to names, ought not our legislator also know how to put the true natural name of

each thing into sounds and syllables, and to make and give all names with a view to

the ideal name, if he be a namer in the true sense? And we must remember that

different legislators will not use the same syllables. For neither does every smith,

although he may be making the same instrument for the same purpose, make them all

98But the word 'chair' can also be considered to be an imitation of the chair made by the craftsman, and

indeed is most often considered as such by Socrates. It would thereby become a supplementary craft to

those crafts which make sensible objects in the likeness of ideal forms. Although standing at a further

remove from the truth than craft, it would operate by analogous methods. Inevitably, a further degree of

technè, would accompany each move away from the living and intelligible truth. There is an

ambivalence in the Cratylus, which on one hand regards words as being imitations of ideas on a par

with things, on the other as an imitation of the idea as manifest in things. Language thus works like a

supplement in the sense outlined in Derrida's grammatologie. If considered as one imitation among

many, it is an essential part of the whole set of possible imitations, which would be incomplete without

it, and which it therefore supplements in the sense in which one supplements a lack. Considered as the
 63

of the same iron. The form must be the same, but the material may vary, and still the

instrument may be equally good of whatever iron made, whether in Hellas or in a

foreign country - there is no difference (389 d - 390 a).

Socrates reconciles the concept that names are essentially determined and not arbitrary with

the fact that names are different in different languages, by arguing that actual names in

specific languages are all copies of one ideal name. But this has the effect of complicating the

relation of the name to crafts. Because the name imitates the essence of things as craft does, it

is be considered as a craft among others: the namer imitates with names just as the carpenter

imitates with wood. But the names he uses are also imitations of the ideal name, and it is this

imitation which makes the other possible.99 Even when it is considered as one craft among

many, the imitation of the essence of an object in language is already supplementary to the

imitation of the ideal name which makes it possible. This problematises the opposition of the

good imitation which directly imitates the essence of things to the bad one which merely

imitates its sensible being because naming is already an ambiguous craft, one which imitates

things because it already imitates an ideal name.

imitation of an imitation, it becomes a supplement in the sense of something added to an already self-

sufficient whole.

99Is there at work here a suspicion of the law outlined by Derrida: A 'performative utterance' could not

'succeed if its formulation did not repeat a "coded" or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the

formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable in

some way as a "citation"?' ('Signature événement contexte' (1971)/ 'Signature Event Context' 18. Trans.

Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Limited Inc (1988). Ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston: Northwestern

UP, 1990. 1-23). I will refer throughout only to the English translation of this work, which is dated

1977.
 64

We saw earlier how the good imitation could only be separated from the bad by

attributing a differential linguistic structure to the object it copied, thereby complicating the

opposition between original and copy. And we also saw that the valorised imitation, by the

name, of the essence of the thing it named, participated in an analogous supplementarity to

the sensible imitation from which it was distinguished. The original cannot be distinguished

from the copy as if it were self-identical and unaffected by the play of language, and the good

copy cannot be distinguished from the bad on the strength of its not being affected by

supplementarity. Again, the outcome of Plato's description of naming is different from the

inflection he attempts to give it. Bearing this in mind, we shall examine the terms of this

inflection. Plato attempts to draw a metaphysical distinction between words and things.

Socrates uses the argument examined earlier that all imitations must be different from their

originals because otherwise they would be duplications, to counter Cratylus's claim that a

name is only a name if it is a perfect imitation of the thing it names (429 b-d). Cratylus's

argument is the common sophistical one that it is impossible to say something which is

untrue, because if you did, you would be referring to something which did not exist, and

since all words must mean something, asserting a falsehood would involve, so the sophists

say, the paradoxical assertion that 'what is, is not'. After making Cratylus admit that a perfect

imitation of Cratylus would not be an imitation of Cratylus, but just another Cratylus,

Socrates says: 'Then you see, my friend, that we must find some other principle of truth in

images [εικονοσ], and also in names, and not insist that an image is no longer an image

[εικονα] when something is added or subtracted. Do you not perceive that images [εικονεσ]

are very far from having qualities which are the exact counterpart of the realities which they

represent?' (432 c-d). Plato answers Cratylus's sophistical argument with a logocentric one.

Word and thing are not identical ideal objects as Cratylus says they are, and therefore the

word does not inevitably disclose the nature of the thing it denotes. But the possibility of

words being used wrongly is used to safeguard the ideality of the thing, while allowing the

word to imitate it. The word is exteriorised, made external, different from and inferior to the
 65

essence it denotes, but it is then reappropriated as the privileged representative of the

essence, as the outside of an idealised inside which it serves.

We are confronted again with the good supplement after Socrates convinces Cratylus

that some names may be accurate, and some inaccurate. Socrates asks:

But if there is a battle of names, some of them asserting they are like the truth

[οµοια τη αληθεια], others contending that they are, how or by what criterion are we

to decide between them [διακρινουµεν]? For there are no other names to which

appeal can be made, but obviously recourse must be had to another standard which,

without employing names, will make clear which of the two are right [ταληθην], and

this must be a standard which shows [δειξαντα δηλον] the truth of things

[την αληθεια των οντων].

Cratylus. I agree.

Socrates. But if that is true, Cratylus, then I suppose that beings [τα οντα]

may be known without names [ανευ ονοµατων]? (438 d-e).100

Because words are not identical with things, they can only be approximations to the things

they denote. But this opens the possibility that some names will be more accurate than others.

The true name is only possible if all names are approximations to the things they name. And

the standard according to which these names are evaluated are the things of which they are

imitations. The implications of Socrates's claim that 'things may be known without names'

extends beyond the mere assertion that you can know something before you know its name,

to an assertion that the thing can be known outside of any recourse to language. This claim is

almost immediately contradicted by Socrates's description of how one knows things: 'What

100The words 'criterion' and 'standard' are inferred by Jowett from the context, and do not have a

counterpart in the Greek text; I have modified his translation of onta with 'things' as before.
 66

other way can there be of knowing them, except the probable and legitimate

[εικοσ δικαιοτατον]101 way, through their affinities [συγγενη], when they are akin to each

other, and through themselves? For that which is other [ετερον] and different [αλλοιον] from

them must signify [σηµαινοι] something other and different from them' (438 e). Things are

known by their relationship to other things, in other words because of their position within a

differential system which functions as a language in a general sense. Plato's logocentric

gesture consists in the affirmation that things can be known independently of language, and

that language is consequently an inferior imitation of this knowledge.

Socrates. Let us suppose that to any extent you please you can learn [µανθανεισ]

things [πραγµατα] through the medium of names, and suppose also that you can learn

them from things themselves [δι αυτων]. Which is likely to be the nobler and clearer

way - to learn of the image [εικονοσ]102 whether the image and the truth [αληθειαν]

of which the image [εικων] is the expression have been rightly conceived

[καλωσ ηκασται], or to learn of the truth [αληθειασ103] whether the truth and the

image [εικονα] of it [αυτησ] have been duly executed [πρεποντωσ ειργασται]?

Cratylus. I should say that we must learn of the truth.

Socrates. How real existence is to be studied or discovered is, I suspect,

beyond you and me. But we admit so much, that the knowledge of things is not to be

derived from names. No, they must be studied and investigated in themselves (439 a-

b).

101Jowett gives 'true and natural', Méridier is more accurate with 'naturel et légitime'.

102Jowett omits to translate autèn te autèn, which Méridier translates with 'en l'étudiant en elle-meme'

('by studying it in itself').

103Jowett omits again to translate autèn te autèn, which Méridier translates with 'pour la connaitre en

elle-meme' ('in order to know it in itself').

 67

Because language is different from things, it is possible to distinguish between good

imitations (naming) and bad (mimesis). The good imitation will imitate the ideal essence of

the thing it imitates, the bad will denote its sensible appearance. But we saw earlier that the

thing cannot be known outside of language, that it is already part of a linguistic system. The

fact that the name is an imitation of the ideal name, and is defined by analogy with mimetic

imitation both register this impossibility. Because it cannot be rigorously distinguished from

its linguistic imitation as the inside from the outside, the bad imitation cannot be

distinguished from the good one as its supplement. Both participate in the structure of

supplementarity introduced by the linguistic structure common to both model and copy

(which supplementarity works like mimesis). Although Plato argues that language can

function as a privileged imitation of beings, he questions that privilege to a greater extent

than does Heidegger (who, as we discussed in the Exergue, attempts to exclude any element

of representation from his account of naming, precisely because it brings with it the

supplementarity which is implicit in Plato's account of language in the Cratylus).

This suggests a principle according to which Socrates can be identified with the poet.

Following (implicitly) the argument in the Cratylus that the name (onoma) is the privileged

technè of revealing the essence of things (albeit things to which the names are secondary),

Socrates as philosopher must also be a namer, must imitate (reveal) the truth which he

discusses in language.104 For example, after banishing the poet in the Republic, Socrates

continues with the mythical tale of Er, a tale reminiscent of the story of the soul's journey in

Phaedrus and of the other parables resorted to by Socrates to justify his conception of the

good. But it is difficult to see what distinguishes these tales from poetry; it seems as though

Socrates is forced to resort to poetry as soon as he banishes it. A possible reason for the

ambivalence identified in Socrates's decision to banish the poets is his reliance on poetic

104For recent discussions of the analogies between Socrates and the poets see Graham, 'Philosophy in

the Cratylus' 3, 4-6, 33; Melberg, 'Plato's "Mimesis"'; and 'Typographie' 237-238.
 68

fables to defend his ideas: the system's constitutive exclusion is also its most problematic.105

This ambiguity becomes clearer against the backdrop of the implicit parallels which Plato

draws between the poet and the philosopher.106 These appear in two dialogues (the

Republic and the Laws) in which Plato is attempting to lay down the constitution of the ideal

state, and in which he is most systematically critical of poets.

[Adeimantus]. How, then, can it be true to say that there will be no end to evils in our

cities until philosophers - people we agreed to be useless - rule in them?

[Socrates]. The question you ask needs to be answered by means of an image

or simile [εικονοσ].

[A]. And you, of course, aren't used to speaking in similes [εικονον λεγειν]!

(Republic VI, 487 e).

105Socrates's attempts to distinguish himself and his entourage from poetry have a similar affect, as

when Socrates says 'You and I, Aidemantus, aren't poets, but we are founding a city. And it's

appropriate for the founders to know the patterns on which poets must base their stories' (Republic III,

379 a), and when Socrates prefaces his imitation of Homer with 'I'll speak without meter since I'm no

poet' (393 d).

106One could include the moments when Socrates claims to have written poetry in order to understand

the meaning of certain dreams, and give him a clear conscience (Phaedo 60 e) as well as Alcibiades's

comparisons of Socrates to a poet, in which he claims that Socrates bewitches like a satyr, and that not

even poetry can match Socrates's verbal prowess (Symposium 215 c. Trans. Michael Joyce (1935). The

Collected Dialogues. 526-574), and that listening to Socrates is like being inspired by a poet (215 d).

There is also Socrates's adoption of Homeric poses (Phaedo 89 b sq., 95 b and 115 a), and his use of

and reference to Homer as an authority, sometimes to support his claims (Protagoras 348 d. Trans. W.

K. C. Guthrie (1956). Collected Dialogues. 308-352, and Gorgias 516 c, 523 a, 525 d and 526 d.

Trans. W. D. Woodhead (1953). Collected Dialogues. 229-307).

 69

Socrates is a maker of icons, an imitator. And this characteristic extends beyond the merely

didactic space to which it is confined here. Socrates later specifies that the philosopher is an

imitator of the divine: 'as he looks at and studies things that are organised and always the

same … he imitates [µιµεισθαι] them and tries to become as like them [αφοµοιουσθαι] as he

can' (VI, 500 c). Not only does the philosopher imitate the divine with his person, literally

mimicking it, but he also attempts to imitate its order graphically: 'we say that the city will

never find happiness until its outline [διαγραφειαν] is sketched [χρωµενοι] by painters

[ζωγραφοι] who use the divine model [παραδειγµατα]' (500 d-e). Plato, in the face of popular

opposition, portrays the philosopher as an artist. This decision is not random, but conditioned

by the fact that the communication between the divine and the earthly sought for by the

philosopher is governed by a generalised mimesis from which the graphic artist (in the

general sense of graphology which includes writing) cannot be excluded.

Clinias. On the choice of a standard by reference to which [the curator of the law]

will permit all the young folk to learn one piece and forbid their learning another.

Tell us your mind without any diffidence.

[…]

Athenian. As I look back on the discourse you and I have been holding ever since

daybreak until this moment - and I really believe that there has been some divine

guiding [επιπνοιασ θεον]107 about the matter - well, be that as it may, our

conversation has been, to my mind, just like a kind of poem. I dare say that there is

nothing surprising in my having felt this keen pleasure in reviewing this compact

formation,108 as I may call it, of discourse of my own composition. The fact is that of

107'Divine guiding' is a poor translation of this expression, which literally means the inspiration or

breath of a god; Diès translates with 'inspiration divine'.

108This is what Taylor calls it, but it has, to the best of what I can ascertain, no counterpart in the

original.
 70

all the compositions I have met with or listened to, in verse or plain prose, I find it

the most satisfactory model109 and the most suitable for the ears of the young

(Laws VII, 811 c-d).

The "divine guiding" nonchalantly referred to is inspiration. The lawmaker who

patterns his laws on dialectic is here explicitly portrayed as a poet. The implicit comparison

of the philosopher to the painter becomes here an explicit comparison to the poet. It is

according to this logic that the simultaneous kinship with and opposition to the poets

proceeds. The Athenian addresses these words to the hypothetical poets who ask to visit the

ideal state:

Oh best of strangers [ω αριστοι … ξενων],110 we ourselves are poets [αυτοι ποιηται],

and, to the extent of our ability [κατα δυναµιν], of the most beautiful and perfect

[καλλιστησ … και αριστεσ]111 tragedy [τραγωδιασ].112 In fact, our whole Republic

109Trans. modified. Diès: 'il n'y a pas de meilleure modèle [παραδειγµα]' ('there is no better model');

Taylor does not translate paradeigma at all.

110Taylor gives 'Respected visitors', whereas Diès translates more literally with 'Excellents étrangers'.

Aristoi is no doubt used here in its sense of 'noble', but I have translated with 'best of' to bring out the

resonance of this epithet with the description, in the same passage, of the Laws as a perfect (aristès)

tragedy, and representation of the perfect (aristou) life.

111Taylor translates, justifiably, with 'finest and best', but thereby loses the sense of artistic beauty

which attaches to the Laws, and which is opposed by Plato to that of poetry. Diès is most accurate with

'de la plus belle et de la meilleure', but 'the most beautiful and best' is inelegant in English.

112Taylor translates the whole sentence with 'we are ourselves authors of a tragedy, and that the finest

and best we know how to make', Diès with 'auteurs de la tragédie, nous-memes le sommes, et, autant

que nous le pouvons, de la plus belle et de la meilleure'.

 71

[πολιτεια]113 has been constructed as a dramatisation [µιµησισ] of beautiful and

perfect life [καλλιστου … και αριστου βιου];114 and that is what we hold to be in

truth the most truthful of tragedies [ειναι τραγωδιαν την αληθεστατην].115 Thus you

are poets, and we also are poets [ποιηται] in the same style, rival artists [αντιτεχνοι],

and rivals [ανταγωνισται] in the finest of all dramas [δραµατοσ],116 one which is apt

to be accomplished [αποτελειν πεφυκεν] only by the true law [αληθησ νοµοσ]117

(Laws VII, 817 b; trans. modified).118

113Politeia is the Greek title of The Republic. Taylor translates with 'polity', Diès, acutely, with

'constitution', doing justice to the word's denotation of both city and text (Diès remarks in the same

translation at 45 n 1 that the state described in the Laws only enjoys a fictional existence

114Taylor translates with 'noble and perfect', Diès with 'la plus belle et la plus excellente'.

115Taylor also translates alèthestatèn with 'noble and perfect', making it interchangeable with

kallistou and aristou (cf. above n). Diès is more accurate with 'la plus authentique'. Alètheia of course

means 'the truth'. Plato, as Diès's translation makes clear, means that his Laws are the most authentic of

tragedies, more true to the ideal of tragedy than the work of the poet. But this is because they are, unlike

poetry, the most true representation (mimesis) of the truth.

116'υµιν αντιτεχνοι τε και ανταγωνισται του καλλιστου δραµατοσ'. Taylor: 'rival artists and rival actors,

and that in the finest of all dramas'; Diès: 'vos rivaux dans la fabrication et dans la représentation du

drame le plus beaux' (my emphasis). The Greek text does not mention acting or representation, which

the translators must have inferred from the context.

117Taylor translates with 'one which can be produced only by a code of true law', Diès with 'que seul est

apte à créer la loi véritable'. Apotelein means literally 'to bring to its telos', and recalls Aristotle's

argument that craft completes (epitelein) physis (cf. above Exrg., n).

118Cf. also 'Athenian. "And can we suppose that the legislator [νοµοθετην] alone among authors is to

give us no counsel about honour, good, or right, not to tell us what they are, and how they must be

cultivated by one who would have a happy life?" Clinias. "Of course he must tell us." Athenian. "Then

if it is discreditable in Homer, or Tyrtaeus, or another poet, to have laid down bad precepts for the

conduct of life in his verses, is the discredit less in Lycurgus, or Solon, or any other author of a
 72

The "Platonic" reading of this statement would be underwritten by the unity of virtue and

beauty in the Platonic text. The most beautiful work of art would be the most faithful earthly

imitation of heavenly virtue.

Despite his penchant for etymology, Heidegger does not read the Laws and the

Cratylus together. But as we have seen, both texts underline the conceptual affinity between

the law and the name: the name is the use of technè to disclose the Being of the being it

names; the Law is a form of poïesis which disclose alètheia. Plato underlines this affinity in

the Cratylus by calling the name giver a nomothetes, usually translated as legislator or law

giver. Thèta, the second part of nomothetes, means service, serfdom, work.119 Socrates writes

that 'the work of the lawgiver [νοµοθετου] is to give names [ονοµα], and the dialectician is to

be his director if the names [ονοµατα] are to be rightly given [θητεσθαι καλωσ]'

(Cratylus 390 d).120 Rightly given translates thètesthai, the second part of nomothetes. The

law giver gives names, the lawgiver is a name giver: nomothetes thèteoh onomata,

nomothetes onomatothetes einai. Plato does once use the word onomatothetes (depending on

the text) when Socrates says in the Charmides that he has been utterly defeated, and 'failed to

discover what that is to which the lawgiver [ονοµατοθετεσ] gave this name [τουνοµα εθετο]

legislation? Surely a society's lawbook should, in right and reason, prove, when we open it, far the best

and the finest work of its whole literature; other men's compositions should either conform to it, or, if

they strike a different note, excite our contempt"' (Laws IX, 858 d-e).

119Diès translates nomothetountes in Laws 859 b with 'en plein travail de législation': 'the work of

legislation'. Cf. also Heidegger's discussion of thésis as being translated by the German tun (to do) and

related to Setzung, Stellung and Lage (put, place, position), and originally kindred to the concept of

physis, to which it was later opposed (quoted in 'Typographie' 212-213 n 62).

120Cf. 'Who gives us the names [παραδιδωσιν … τα ονοµατα] which we use? […] Does not the law

[νοµοσ] seem to you to give us them?' (388 d).

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of temperance or wisdom.'121 The word seems to be extremely rare, which is probably why

Jowett translates with the more usual 'lawgiver', and Croiset compromises with 'le législateur

du langage'. Brandwood gives this as the only use in Plato, and even then seems to say that

the Bodleian, Venetus, and Vidobonensis manuscripts give nomothetès.122 It remains

121Charmides 175 b. Trans. Benjamin Jowett (1871). Collected Dialogues. 99-122. Reference also

made to Charmide. Trans. and ed. Alfred Croiset. Œuvres complètes de Platon II (1921) (52-58).

Plato's use of onomastikos at 424 a does not refer to the name-giver as a role, but rather to someone

(anyone) who has a gift for giving names. Anyone of any profession might be onomastikos. Only the

(o)nom(at)othetès is officially endowed with the role of giving names in Plato. Cf. Socrates's question

'is every man a legislator, or only those who possess the skill [τεχνην]' to which Hermogenes answers,

'the skilled only' ((388 e; trans. modified).

122Leonard Brandwood. A Word Index to Plato. Leeds: W. S. Maney and Sons, 1976. Lydell and Scott

refer in this connection to Stallbaum's note to the Cratylus at 389 d (Henry George Lydell and Robert

Scott. Greek-English Lexicon (1843). Rev. and augmented by Henry Stuart Jones assisted by Roderick

McKenzie (1925). Ninth ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1940). In fact, it is not this note, but the one to

Cratylus 388 e (54-55) which provides an extended discussion in Latin on the relationship between

nomothetès and onomatothetès (Cratylus. Ed. Godfried Stallbaum. Platonis Opera Omnia. 10 vols.

Gotha and Erfurt: Hennings, 1827-1861. V i (1834)). The note seems to indicate that certain editors,

namely Schleiermacher and Heindorf, consistently put variants on onomatothetès in their editions,

where most editions of the Cratylus gave variants on nomothetès. Lydell and Scott mention only one

use of the word outside Plato, and a misuse at that, when Lobeck cites Ficinius, Basileenses, Gudianus

and also Heindorf as giving onomathètes (and not the correct onomatothètes) in his edition of the

classical grammarian Phrynichus (Phrynichi Eclogae Nominum et Verborum Atticorum. Ed. August

Lobeck. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1820. 668). Both he and Stallbaum seem to argue that this reading is non-

standard (Stallbaum seems to base this judgement in part on the argument of the dialogue), and

Stallbaum seems to say that Schleiermacher's second edition followed Bekker in reading nomothetes.

No mention of this crux is made in the Budé edition, or any other I have seen. References to the word in

Eustathius's (xii ad) commentary on the Iliad, and in his Opusculi are mentioned in Thesaurus Graecae

Linguae. Ed. Henri Stéphane. 8 vols. Paris: Ambroise Firmin Didot, 1842-1846. V (1842-1846). The
 74

however that the name giver, in the Cratylus, is named lawgiver by Plato, when a specific

word for name giver was available. By so doing, in a dialogue dedicated to etymology and

concerned with the representation of essences in language, Plato implicitly presents the name

and the law as being related conceptually as well as etymologically.123

That Heidegger should not have noticed this is surprising for two reasons. First, as

we saw in our Exergue, he rewrites Plato's technè in order to bring it closer to his own (by

defining it in relation to the pre-Socratic concept of physis). The Cratylus already points

toward the rewriting of the Republic which Heidegger attempts in the Nietzsche. Secondly,

the Law, for Heidegger just as for Plato in the Laws, is the paradigm of artistic creation. And

this concept is one which Heidegger derives from his Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche of

all people, in the very book in which he rewrites Plato's technè. Crucially, the site of this

opposition for Nietzsche is his polemic with Wagner. And the polemic with Wagner aims at

the aesthetic, because Wagner is the epitome of art as lawless emotional expression:

references given by them are to Iliad p. 39, II and Opusc. p. 143, 37, but they do not specify any edition

and I was unable to trace the reference. Lobeck also mentions Eustathius's reading, also citing page 39.

I am unclear however whether Eustathius used the word in his commentary on Homer, or in relation to

the passages in Plato which we are discussing.

123This point is also noticed by Sung-Won Lee in his reading of Coleridge's reading of Aeschylus's

Prometheus Bound: 'Hermes Bound: Coleridge's Reading of Prometheus Bound' 35 and 50 n 13.

History and Mimesis (Occasional Papers III by Members of the Program in Literature and

Philosophy). Eds. Irving J. Massey and Sung-Won Lee. Buffalo: Dept. of English, SUNY, Buffalo,

1983. 30-51 (cf. in particular 343). He argues that Coleridge's opposition between nomos and idea

presents nomos as the exteriorisation and actualisation of the idea, and that nomos is therefore

understandable as the verbal representation of the idea in Coleridge's text.

 75

Art is not only subject to rules, must not only obey laws, but is in itself legislation.

Only as legislation is it truly art. What is inexhaustible, what is to be created, is the

law. Art that dissolves style in sheer ebullition of feelings misses the mark, in that its

discovery of law is essentially disturbed; such discovery can become actual in art

only when the law drapes itself in the freedom of a form [Gestalt] in order that way

to come openly into play (Nietzsche Ch. 13, 130-131).

To whom can we attribute this expression, Heidegger-Nietzsche? If so, our reading of the

Cratylus and of the Laws authorises us to see this as an almost straightforward adoption by

Heidegger-Nietzsche of a motif in Plato. And perhaps, given that the adoption is so

straightforward (without any reversal), it does not fit Heidegger's description of the

relationship between Plato and Nietzsche (or of his own relationship to either philosopher).

Lacoue-Labarthe writes that Plato-Nietzsche-Heidegger's decision against Wagner (and

aesthetics) 'is nothing other than the very affirmation of style, because in style, that is to say

in the possibility of figuration, is put into play what governs all History: the law (das Gesetz),

a word we must understand, in all probability, not in its Kantian sense but in the sense

permitted by Hölderlin's interpretation and "situation", provided the commentator allows

himself the "right" to consider art as the presentation of the law' (Musica Ficta 210-211/113;

trans. modified). Lacoue-Labarthe adds in a footnote that Gesetz is the word used by

Hölderlin to translate nomos in Sophocles and Pindar. This is as close as possible to a

paraphrase of Plato, except that Heidegger does not maintain the subordination of art to the

law in the strict sense advanced by Plato:

The Gestalt […] is the presentation - of course without presentation - of the law. The

law is authorized only by art, or, it comes to the same thing, it is art alone that founds

the law. Art is the political principle as such; this cannot be more clearly said. Yet it

is apparent that the fundamental mimetology that subtends Heidegger's conception of

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art comes to be condensed within the concept of the law: the law is nothing other

than the articulation (a derivative of ars, as we know) of the relation between

phusis […] and tekhnè […]' (Musica Ficta 212/113-114).

Lacoue-Labarthe opposes Heidegger's 'fundamental mimetology' to aesthetic

mimetology. Aesthetic mimetology, as imagery, is opposed to 'presentation without

presentation', that is to a notion of the sublime. The aesthetic mimetology which is allied to

affective expression is not only opposed to the law as disclosure of alètheia outside of any

reference to human subjectivity, but also to the law as sublime. And this claim becomes

articulated to a wider claim, made incessantly by Lacoue-Labarthe in his polemic with

Heidegger. Heidegger's allegiance to Nazism, and in that connection to national aestheticism,

runs counter to his privileging of the sublime law over aesthetic mimetology:124

Heidegger's mimetology is very deeply political. It thinks itself to be, and offers itself

as, the truth, until then dissimulated - even to the eyes of Nietzsche, who nonetheless

presented it - of this weak mimetology inherited from Platonism and from the modern

aesthetic that only ever authorizes a politics of affective effusion, or a political

aestheticism. But was it sufficient to demarcate itself, in this mode, from mimetic

passivity - and from political aestheticism - to really produce a political distinction

[discrimination]?

[…]

The deconstruction of the aesthetic was a necessary task - in the best of cases it is a

matter, for art, of a liberation from philosophical tutelage - and probably an

inevitable task - inasmuch as philosophy was condemned to be liberated, or to be

delivered, from itself (213/114).

124Cf. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. 'Histoire et mimèsis' (1983) 109-111 and 'A Jacques Derrida - Au

nom de' 252-254. L'imitation des modernes. 87-111; 229-255.

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We recognise here the outcome of our discussion of Lacoue-Labarthe in the Exergue.

Lacoue-Labarthe reads Heidegger in order to free his affirmation of the sublime law from its

betrayal in national aestheticism.125 This, for him, is the only means to save philosophy from

125I would like here to mention the ideas of Dr. Filip Karfik, from Charles University in Prague, who

argues that Heidegger participates in a movement characteristic of the whole tradition of German

idealist philosophy - from Kant to Heidegger himself - in relation to the Greeks. Although it is

principally thanks to this tradition that we are today able to understand the Greeks (cf. 'L'antagonisme'

(1985) 118. L'imitation des Modernes. 113-131), and without denying the necessity of their reading,

Karfik argues that they all, to a different extent, attempt to Protestantise the Greeks. Lacoue-Labarthe

makes a similar point concerning Nietzsche and his relationship to Heidegger ('Histoire et mimèsis'

103-104), and concerning the stakes for Heidegger of Nietzsche's attempt to remove the Latin filter

through which Greek culture reaches modern man ('L'antagonisme' 123-125). The most important

concept for Heidegger, argues Karfik, is Geschichtlichkeit, meaning both historicity and (from

geschehen, to happen) 'eventuality', 'happening'. Thinking the world as a series of events is

characteristic of the Hebraic world view, as opposed to the Hellenic which thinks in terms of permanent

essences. In light of the fact that the spirit of Reformation - in which German philosophy from Kant to

Heidegger read the Greeks - attempted with Luther to go back to the Hebraic texts of the Bible, we are

confronted with the curious fact that Heidegger has Hebraicised the pre-Socratics whom he opposes to

the (Latin) Socratic and metaphysical philosophers. This rich vein yields other interesting Judaic

elements in the anti-semitic Heidegger's thought. The most obvious of these is Heidegger's iconoclasm,

whose fundamental source is of course the Mosaic law (see above, Intro., § 4). Finally, one might

consider Karfik's critique of Heidegger's privileging of Being over the subject. The subject, according

to Heidegger's writing during the Kehre, is nothing, and simply permits the advent or revelation of

Being. Karfik criticises this because of the random nature of the Being in Heidegger: Being might be

just anything, and this fact can be linked to a certain (political) irresponsibility in Heidegger's thinking.

But Being, in that connection, also resembles nothing so much as the Jewish (and Moslem) God, who is

absolute, and before whom man must simply prosternate himself (cf. Bennington 'Mosaic Fragment: If

Derrida were an Egyptian' 101-102. Derrida: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Wood. Oxford and
 78

itself, from the subjectival premise deconstructed by mimesis, and for art to save itself from

aesthetics. But, as we suggested before, art saves itself from aesthetics, it seems, only at the

cost of becoming indistinguishable from the law, and from the discourse which deconstructs

both subjectival philosophy and the aesthetic definition of art. Moreover, insufficient

attention is paid to the fact that Plato already opposes the law, and a certain notion of style, to

mimesis. In the following section, we shall verify that mimesis in the Platonic text describes

the role of art as valorised by aesthetics. Plato already therefore opposes the law to aesthetics,

and condemns aesthetics in the name of the law. But, we shall further suggest, a reading of

the Phaedrus will show the way toward an understanding of art which is not the law, and

therefore not indistinguishable from the act of deconstruction, but at the same time not

aesthetic. This valorisation of art is also iconographic, and runs against the notion which

underlies much of Lacoue-Labarthe's discussion of art, namely that only sublime iconoclasm

can escape the aesthetic.

2. Mimesis and Aesthetics

Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. 97-119). This is an opportune moment to mark another reservation

vis-à-vis Heidegger, closely connected to Karfik's. Lacoue-Labarthe's 'Typographie' criticises

Heidegger, in its conclusion, for reinstating the subject of metaphysics. How can this be, one might

argue, when Heidegger makes the subject into nothing before Being? Perhaps by making the subject

into absolutely nothing, Heidegger instates the absolute subject; being nothing before Being, perhaps

the subject becomes everything. This is closely related to the question of the gift. The self-effacement of

the subject, just like a certain kind of attempt to give 'selflessly', might be recuperated by the

approbation or gratitude which the giver enjoys. The effaced subject in Heidegger might be

recompensed for his effacement before Being, by that Being's approbation; his total self-lowering

before Being allows him to approve his humility from the perspective of being. His loss (of self) is his

gain (of Being).

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The linguistic imitation valorised by Plato is valorised because it is a kind of craft. It is

because it is a craft that it directly imitates the essence of the thing it imitates. As we saw

earlier, the legislator is the craftsman who makes the names in the likeness of the ideal name.

But what craft is qualified to use these names in order to give an accurate description of the

things named? In offering an implicit answer to this question, the Ion also articulates the

general relationship of poetry to craft, understood here not in the elevated (Heideggerian)

sense toward which the Cratylus points, but in the limited technical sense which Heidegger

blames Plato for substituting for the true one.

Socrates. Now what about the passage in which Homer tells how Hecamede, Nestor's

concubine, gave the wounded Machaon the broth to drink? The passage runs

something like this:

She grated goat's milk cheese in Pramnian wine,

With brazen grater, adding onion as relish to the brew.

On the question of whether Homer here speaks properly or not, is it for the art of the

physician or the rhapsode's art, to discriminate aright?

Ion. The art of the physician.126

What exactly does Socrates mean by 'speaking properly'? What's at issue is whether Homer's

description is accurate or not, whether you really give people goat's cheese in Pramnian wine

when they're sick. And given the question, the only logical answer is (as Ion is forced to

admit) a physician.

126Ion 530 c. Trans. Lane Cooper (1955). Collected Dialogues. 216-228.

 80

The question of who should be the judge of how accurate a poetic description is,

takes place within the wider attempt to find a role for the rhapsode that distinguishes him

from practitioners of other arts. What is it that the rhapsode knows that a specialist in another

art wouldn't know better? Answer: nothing. The exchange quoted above is typical of the

dialogue as a whole on this point. Socrates goes through a string of quotations from Homer,

and the subject described by each quotation falls within the field of expertise of a particular

art: if Homer describes prophesying, the prophet knows better than the rhapsode whether his

description is accurate, the swineherd knows more about keeping pigs, the general more

about wars etc. This amounts to saying that there is no subject as to which the rhapsode is

better equipped to evaluate the accuracy of a poet's description than the craftsman

specialising in this particular craft. The person best able to imitate a thing in language is the

craftsman whose field of expertise encompasses that particular thing, or (on a more elevated

level) the namer. The panorama of trades adduced by Socrates in evidence of his argument

defines a sphere of practical activity from which the rhapsode is excluded; he is incapable of

competing with the tradesman in the business of judging imitation.127

The implications of this for the poet are obvious, because the same question could be

asked of his role: of what subject can it be said that the poet has a more accurate knowledge?

None. The imitation valorised by Plato in the Cratylus is a craft, and, since the 'poets … have

their excellence not … from art [τεχνη]' (533 e), the imitations they make cannot be of the

kind valorised by Plato. They are unable to make an imitation which is as accurate as that of a

specialist in the craft of that object of imitation. The poet is no more able to work in the

business of imitation than is the rhapsode. The dialogue attempts to demonstrate that you can

only claim that poetry imitates life by devalorising poetry, for whatever the poet imitates, the

expert will always imitate it better. But what kind of imitation is it that the poet makes? The

127Cf. Stephen Ratcliffe. 'Uttering Mimesis [Review of Michael Davidson, Analogy of Ion (The

Figures: 1988)]' 123. Occident 103:1 (1990). 120-124.

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Stranger's distinction between images (eikon [236 a]; the word used for images in the

Cratylus), and semblances (lit. appearances: phantasma [236 b]) offers this precision:

Stranger. One art […] is the making of likenesses [εικαστικη]. The perfect example

of this consists in creating a copy that conforms to the proportions of the original in

all three dimensions and giving moreover the proper color to every part.

Thaetetus. Why, is not that what all imitators try to do?

Stranger. Not those sculptors or painters whose works are of colossal size. If

they were to reproduce the true proportions of a well-made figure, as you know, the

upper parts would look too small, and the lower too large, because we see the one at

a distance, the other close at hand.

Thaetetus. That is true.

Stranger. So artists, leaving the truth to take care of itself, do in fact put into

the images [ειδωλοισ ] they make, not real proportions, but those that will appear

beautiful [δοξουσασ καλασ].128

The true likeness or image discussed in the Sophist has the same name and the same

characteristics as the image discussed in the Cratylus. Technè, whether that of the craftsman,

or of the namer-philosopher, produces a privileged image (eikon) of the truth. Mimesis,

because it is not the work of technè, produces a devalorised image. The exclusion of poetic

mimesis from technè is of a piece with its devalorisation by Plato-Heidegger which we

examined in the Exergue. It is also the case, as we shall demonstrate, that the image made by

the artists, the semblance whose concern is more with beautiful appearance than with the

128Sophist 235 d - 236 a. Trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford (1935). Collected Dialogues. 957-1017.

Reference also made to Sophist. Bilingual ed. Trans. Harold North Fowler (1921). Thaetetus and

Sophist. Ed. Harold North Fowler. Second ed. (1928). London: Heinemann and Cambridge MA:

Harvard UP, 1961. 259-459.

 82

truth, is the same imitation which Socrates condemns in the poet in the Republic (and which

he opposes to naming in the Cratylus).

Socrates's assertion in the Phaedo that 'a poet, if he is to be worthy of the name,

ought to work on imaginative [µυθοσ] themes, not descriptive [λογουσ] ones' (Phaedo 61

b)129 seems to point in that direction. To further verify this, we must turn again to the

beginning of Book X of Republic. In distinguishing the painter from the craftsman, Socrates

demonstrates to Glaucon the difference between the imitation made by the painter (whose

situation is the same as the poet's in this case [cf. 597 e]), of the craftsman's work, and that

made by the craftsman of the forms: '[Socrates]. "Then consider this very point: What does

painting do in each case? Does it imitate [µιµησασθαι] that which is [το ον] as it is [ωσ εχει],

or does it imitate that which appears [φαινοµενον] as it appears [φαινεται]? Is it an imitation

of appearances [φαντασµατοσ] of truth [αληθειασ]?"130 [Glaucon]. "Of appearances"' (598

b).131 Like the painter in the Cratylus, both the painter and the poet in Republic are imitators

of sensual appearances, not of truth. And the word for appearance here is related to the

phantasmatos we encountered in the Sophist. Socrates continues:

Then imitation is far removed from the truth, for it touches only a small part of each

thing and a part that is itself only an image [ειδολων]. And that, it seems, is why it

can produce everything. For example, we say that a painter can paint a cobbler, a

carpenter, or any other craftsman, even though he knows nothing about these crafts.

Nevertheless, if he is a good painter and displays his painting of a carpenter at a

129Robin translates with 'des mythes' and 'des arguments', respectively.

130The Greek reads alètheias ousa, 'the truth of its essence', or even 'its essential truth'.

131Cf. Heidegger's argument that not all appearances are opposed to truth here, but the particular

appearances which do not reveal the rational essence of things (Nietzsche Ch. 22, 178).
 83

distance, he can deceive children and foolish people into thinking that it is truly a

carpenter (598 b-c).

Now the word eidolon, which Grube translates as image in the passages we have just

examined, is very different from the word eikon which in the Sophist and the Cratylus

renders the image whose concern is truth. Eidolon is cited in the glossary by Grube as

meaning 'image, statue' (which would suggest an affinity with those imitations which are like

the colossal sculptures which the Sophist contrasts with the image, eikon). Moreover, the

phantasma is also described with the plural of eidolon: eidolois. Thus, both in the

Republic and in the Sophist, the word eidolon is used to describe the imitation whose concern

is appearance which he later calls phantasma. Indeed, eidolon is used by Socrates elsewhere

in the Republic to mean 'phantom', specifically in a description of people whose lives are

ruled by the gratification of desire:

Then isn't it necessary for these people to live with pleasures that are mixed with

pains, mere images [εδωλοισ] and shadow-paintings [εσκιαγραφηµεναισ] of true

pleasures? And doesn't the juxtaposition of these pleasures and pains make them

appear intense, so that they give rise to mad erotic passions in the foolish, and are

fought over in just the way that Stesichorus tells us the phantom [ειδολων] of Helen

was fought over at Troy by men ignorant over the truth? (IX, 586 b-c).

The word used to describe that part of the thing which the poet imitates is used to mean an

image very similar to the semblance discussed in the Sophist. It is deceptive and far removed

from the truth, and the opposite of the eikona which imitates the truth of the thing. It also has

the connotations of lifelessness which distinguishes the image from its living model.

Crucially, the words phantasma and eidolon are used to characterise the imitations of

appearances which are opposed to the true imitation rendered by eikon.

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Socrates's characterisation of the poet's image in the Republic as eidolon, is made at

the same time as he asserts that the poet is not a craftsman. This remark is followed by a

prolonged attempt, on almost identical lines to the Ion, to demonstrate that the poet is also

master of no craft.132 After two repetitions of the fact that neither the poet nor the painter

know anything about the crafts they imitate, Plato reiterates: 'We say that a maker of an

image [ειδολωυ ποιητησ]133 - an imitator [µιµητησ] - knows nothing about that which is

[οντοσ] but only about its appearance [φαινοµενου]' (601 b). The fact that the poet is not a

craftsman goes hand in hand with his inability to make the imitation of the truth which is the

province of craft. He is thus confined to the role of imitator of appearances, which we saw

had certain similarities with the imitations which the Cratylus marked as inferior to naming.

Our discussion requires a more precise understanding of what Plato means by

appearances. Socrates reiterates at 601 c that the imitator does not have knowledge of the

things he imitates: only the craftsman who makes them and the craftsman who uses them (the

cobbler who makes the bridle and the horseman for example) do (601 c - 602 b). He then

adds another dimension by arguing that the poet's imitation 'is a kind of game [παιδιαν] and

not to be taken seriously [σπουδην]' (602 b). Paidia will elsewhere be used by Plato to

describe the sphere which serious philosophy defines as the aesthetic, as will the opposition

between game and seriousness, to distinguish the philosopher from the Sophist, and

philosophy from rhetoric and writing. Socrates then asks 'On which of a person's parts does

[poetic imitation] exert its power?' (602 c). He then describes the part of man which is

affected by appearances, which is the point that is of interest to us here. Imitations are

halfway between being and non-being, and affect man in a part of his soul which is halfway

132Cf. also Republic X, 598 d, 599 a-b, 599 b - 600 a and 600 a-e.

133Chambry: 'le créateur de fantomes'.

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between knowledge and ignorance. And this part, as we shall see later, is the part of man in

which his emotions are seated.

[Socrates]. And something looks crooked when seen in the water and straight when

seen out of it, while something else looks both concave and convex because our eyes

are deceived by its colors, and every other similar sort of confusion is clearly present

in our soul. And it is because they exploit this weakness in our nature that trompe

l'œuil painting, conjuring, and other forms of trickery have powers that are little short

of magical.

[Glaucon]. That's true.

And don't measuring, counting, and weighing give us most welcome

assistance in these cases, so that we aren't ruled by something's looking bigger,

smaller [etc.], but by calculation, measurement or weighing?

Of course (602 c-d).

Appearance and truth describe two kinds of knowledge, the first subjective, the second

objective. Both appeal to the parts of the soul affected by the relevant kind of knowledge.

Appearance relates to truth like an image to its model: appearances are similar to the truth,

and only by comparing them to the truth can we assess how accurate they are. The

relationship between the two knowledges is also hierarchical in the sense that opinion needs

the assistance of truth. Appearance is therefore related to the part of man's soul which is ruled

by opinion. Doxa, the Greek for opinion, is also used to mean appearance in the passage cited

from the Sophist ('doxousas') (236 a). Socrates indeed says in Book VI, 'as regards truth and

untruth, the division is in this ratio: As the opinable [δοξαστον] is to the knowable [γνωστον],

so the likeness [οµοιωθεν] is to the thing that it is like [ωµοιωθη]' (510 a).
 86

A more intricate version of this argument is found in Book V. Socrates is discussing

the difference between someone who only 'believes in beautiful things, but doesn't believe in

the beautiful itself' (476 c), and someone able to make that distinction. Not coincidentally, we

find ourselves discussing the beautiful doxa (appearance) with which Socrates contrasts the

true image in the Sophist. Socrates says of the person able to make the distinction: 'So we'd

be right to call his thought knowledge [γνωµην], since he knows [γιγνωσκοντοσ], but we

should call the other person's thought opinion [δοξαν], since he opines [δοξασζοντοσ]' (476

d).134 Socrates then offers a further precision on opinion, ostensibly to console the person

who has opinion but no knowledge.135 He distinguishes knowledge from ignorance, saying

that 'knowledge is set over what is, while ignorance is set over what is not' (477 a), in other

words, objects of knowledge exist, whereas objects of ignorance do not. But what then is the

object of opinion?

[Socrates]. Do we, then, opine what is not? Or is it impossible to opine what is not?

Think about this. Doesn't someone who opines set his opinion over something? Or is

it possible to opine, yet to opine nothing?

[Glaucon]. It's impossible.

…[]

[S]. So someone opines neither what is nor what is not?

[G]. How could it be otherwise?

[S]. Then opinion is neither ignorance nor knowledge?

134Méchoulan delineates the semantic range of doxa in order to show its intimate relation to aesthesis,

and to argue that aesthetics must evolve in the realm of doxa ('Theoria, Aesthesis, Mimesis et Doxa'

149/147).

135As we shall see, aesthetics, which is the science of the part of the soul we are discussing now, is

frequently described as consolation. The game is also a form of consolation, a substitute for the serious

activity which defines it as game.

 87

[G]. So it seems [ειοικεν ].

[…]

[S]. So opinion is intermediate between these two […] (478 b-d).

Opinion is thus intermediate between knowledge and ignorance. It is neither knowledge nor

ignorance, but an approximation to knowledge. Socrates compares a true opinion in the Meno

to the statues [αγαλµασιν] of Daedalus:

If you have one of his works untethered, it is not worth much; it gives you the slip

like a runaway slave. But a tethered specimen is very valuable, for they are

magnificent creations. And that, I may say, has a bearing on the matter of true

opinions. True opinions [δοξασ τασ αληθεισ] are a fine thing and do all sorts of good

so long as they stay in their place, but they will not stay long. They run away from a

man's soul [ψυχη];136 so they are not worth much until you tether them by working

out the reason. Once they are tied down, they become knowledge [επιστηµαι], and

are stable. That is why knowledge is something more valuable [τιµεωτερον] than right

opinion [ορθησ δοξησ]. What distinguishes one from the other is the tether

[δεσµω].137

Socrates's sympathy for the man with opinion and no knowledge in the Republic is thus not

an accidental feature of a generalised devalorisation of opinion. Opinion moves within the

orbit of truth, and sometimes even encounters it. What separates it from knowledge is the

tether, the ability to keep permanently to the place of truth. And it is in this intermediate

136Guthrie translates with 'a man's mind', Croiset and Bodin, correctly, with 'de notre ame'.

137Meno 97 e - 98 a. Trans. W. K. C. Guthrie (1956). Collected Dialogues. 353-384. Reference also

made to Ménon. Trans. and ed. Alfred Croiset with the collaboration of Louis Bodin. Œuvres

complètes III ii (1923). 234-280.

 88

sphere, which is not knowledge but nevertheless related to knowledge, that the poet's

imitations operate.

Returning to where we left off in Book X of Republic, we come across a second and

related feature of opinion, namely its connection with emotions. Socrates is describing the

effect poetry has on the part of the soul which is affected by appearances through the

example of tragedy. Tragedy encourages us to grieve at death, whereas reason encourages us

to control our feelings. Socrates: 'We must accept what has happened as we would the fall of

the dice, and then arrange our affairs in whatever way reason determines to be best. We

mustn't hug the hurt part and spend our time weeping and wailing like children when they

trip' (604 c). The part of our soul affected by the imitations of appearances, is not just the seat

of our opinions, but also of our feelings.138 Socrates continues by making and exemplifying

again and again that the poet appeals to what we would call the emotional over and above the

rational. Socrates: 'And in the case of sex [αφροδισιων], anger, and all the desires

[επιθυµητικων], pleasures [ηδεων] and pains [λυπηρων] that we say accompany all our

actions, poetic imitation has the very same effect [εργαζεται] on us. It nurtures [τρεφει] and

waters [αρδουσα] them and establishes them as rulers [αρχοντα] in us when they ought to be

withered and to be ruled' (606 d). In avoiding the true and accurate imitation, the poet makes

the sensually gratifying one. Feelings can sometimes be consonant with reason, sometimes

not, but they should always be ruled by reason.139 By implication, feelings in the Platonic

aesthetic occupy a similar intermediate position to opinions.140

138A similar point is made in the Gorgias 502 a-b.

139Cf. Philebus 63 c - 64 a. Trans. Richard Hackforth (1945). Collected Dialogues. 1086-1150). We

find a similar characterisation of poetic imitation in Laws II:

Athenian. And what of the various arts of imitation [τεχναι εικαστικαι] which work by

producing likenesses [εργασια … οµοιων]? If they are so far successful, I mean if they give
 89

rise to an attendant pleasure [ηδονην], charm [χαριν], I suppose, would be just the right name

for it?

Clinias. Yes.

Athenian. Whereas the rightness [ορθοτητα] of such products, speaking generally,

depends not on their pleasantness [ουκ ηδονη], but on accurate correspondence [ισοτησ] in

quality and magnitude?

Clinias. True.

Athenian. Thus the only case in which it will be right to make pleasure our standard

of judgement is that of a performance which provides us neither [απεργαζοµενου; des Places

translates more accurately with 'which does not produce' ('qui ne produit')] with utility

[ωφελιαν], nor truth [αληθειαν], nor resemblance [οµοιοτητα], though, of course, it must do us

no harm [βλαβην] either, an activity practised solely with a view to this concomitant charm

[χαριτοσ], which is very properly called pleasure, unattended by any of the results just

specified?

Clinias. You refer only to harmless [αβλαβη] pleasure?

Athenian. Yes, and I only use the name play [παιδιαν] for it in cases where it does

neither harm nor good worth taking into serious [σπουδησ] account […]

[…]

Athenian. Then surely it follows […] that a man's feeling of pleasure, or his erroneous

belief [δοξη µη αληθει; des Places translates with 'true belief' ('l'opinion vraie'), but although

Taylor gets it right this time, one wonders whether even true opinion might indeed not also

have been inadmissible] is never a proper standard by which to judge of any representation

[µιµησιν] (Laws II 667 c-e; my emphasis).

140This point is also made by Girard, although from a different perspective Cf. 'Typographie' 231. Cf.

also Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. 'Cartesian Mirror/Quixotic Web: Toward a Narrativity of Desire.' Mosaic

26:2 (Spring 1993). 83-110 and Leo Bersani. 'Representation and Its Discontents.' Raritan 1:1 (Summer

1981) 3-17.
 90

Plato's condemnation of the mimetic poet in the Republic grants him capacities for

which aesthetics came to valorise poetry. His imitations are not adequate to the truth, because

of his lack of technè, but are nevertheless related to it (this is the definition of aesthetic

realism). Many of these accounts describe literature as imitating not objective reality, but

opinions, sometimes described as cultural reality. They draw their inspiration of course from

Aristotle: 'one has to justify the impossible by reference to the requirements of poetry, or to

the better [i.e. describing things as they should be, not as they are], or to opinion [δοξαν].'141

These approaches are anticipated by Plato when he describes the poet's mimesis as affecting

beliefs and opinions: the only thing which changes is the value attached to such imitations.

Plato's designation of mimesis as the cause of sensual gratification also anticipates a

sensualist aesthetics (that of impressionistic modernism for example),142 which accepts

Plato's definition of the artist while placing a different value on him. It also anticipates the

attempt, for example by T. S. Eliot or by Empson and Richards, to portray literature as

affecting the emotions and feelings, but also appealing to the intelligence. Plato, by relating

the emotional part of the soul to the opinion forming one, opens up the possibility of a

relationship between emotions and intelligence of the kind aimed at by practical criticism.

Each of these points relates to a more general one: mimesis is secondary to knowledge, but

nonetheless related to it, which is how philosophy, in the form of aesthetics, has always

141Poetics XXV, 1461b10. Trans. Ingram Bywater. The Complete Works of Aristotle. II, 2316-2340.

The text employed for this translation is that of R Kassel (Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1965). W.

Hamilton Fyfe (1927), using the Vahlen text (Leipzig, 1885), renders doxan dei aganein as 'popular

opinion' (Poetics 110--111. Aristotle, The Poetics, "Longinus," On the Sublime, and Demetrius, On

Style (1927). Bilingual ed. Rev. ed. London: Heinemann, 1932. 4-117), and this sense is also implicit in

Bywater's text and translation.

142Cf. Michael H. Levenson. A Genealogy of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 55-150.
 91

described art. We can see that Plato, by banishing mimesis from technè, inaugurates

aesthetics.143

3. The Poet and the Sophist

The semblances discussed in the Sophist (which as we saw names the images which Plato

ascribes to the poet in Republic and elsewhere) are ascribed to the Sophist in that dialogue

(268 c). It seems therefore that the poet banished in Republic is a kind of sophist.144 The

relationship between the poet and sophist are articulated in more detail in the Gorgias:

'Socrates. Well then, you claim that you are an expert in the art of rhetoric and that you can

143Abrams's simplistic view of Plato's concept of imitation prevents him from seeing this point: 'The

Socratic dialogues, then, contain no aesthetics proper, for neither the structure of Plato's cosmos nor the

pattern of his dialectic permit us to consider poetry as poetry - as a special kind of product having its

own reason for being' (The Mirror and the Lamp Ch. I.ii, 9). As we have seen, Plato does grant poetry

such a distinctive place precisely by excluding it from accurate imitation, from the very framework to

which Abrams reduces Plato's entire discussion of art. Plato's role for the poet belongs in fact to the

expressive theory of art, characterised (and valorised) by Abrams as asserting that 'Poetry is the

overflow, utterance, or projection of the thought and feelings of the poet' (21-22). Within this paradigm,

'the artist himself becomes the major element generating both the artistic product and the criteria by

which it is to be judged' (22). The expressive theory adopts pure subjectivity as its ultimate value, which

is precisely what Plato criticises the poet for. Abrams's Romanticism merely revalorises something

which was already there, albeit occupying a 'lowly status', in Plato's aesthetic. What I will show in

subsequent chapter is what French Symbolism owes to Plato. I will also demonstrate the superiority of

Plato over the caricature of Romanticism advanced by Abrams. In particular, by describing art as the

'product' "generated" by an artist, Abrams squarely occupies the subjectival ground with which our

Exergue was preoccupied. At work in Plato, and all those whose critical writing engages with his work,

is an attempt to think of art beyond the subject and beyond aesthetics.

144I discuss rhetoricians and sophists in this section as if they were more or less the same thing, in

which I can claim some support from Plato in Gorgias 465 c.

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make rhetoricians of others. Now just what is the scope of rhetoric? Weaving, for example,

has to do with the making of garments. You agree?' (Gorgias 449 d). Gorgias at first answers

that the art of rhetoric has to do with words (449 d). Socrates interrogation of Gorgias then

proceeds on almost identical lines to his interrogation of Ion: just as he asked Ion what

knowledge the rhapsode had in order to judge the value of a poem, he asks Gorgias what the

words of which the rhetorician is a craftsman are concerned with. Socrates: 'And so it is with

the other arts also, Gorgias. Each of them is concerned with words that have to do with its

own subject matter' (450 b). And, as was the case with the rhapsode and the poet, the words

of which the rhetorician claims to be a craftsman can always be shown to refer to the object

of a craft. The craftsman specialising in that particular craft will thus always have a superior

knowledge of the words relating to that craft than the rhetorician will. Socrates demonstrates

this, as he does in the Ion, by asking what the words of which the rhetorician is master refer

to, and showing that each subject falls within the remit of a particular craft (439 d - 452 d).145

To this Gorgias answers that by the power of rhetoric he means

[T]he power to convince [πειθειν] by your words the judges in the court […] or any

other gathering of a citizen body. And yet possessed of such power [δυναµει] you

will make the doctor […] your slave, and your businessman will prove to be making

money, not for himself, but for another, for you can speak and persuade [πειθειν] the

multitude.

Socrates. Now at last, Gorgias, […] you assert that rhetoric is a creator of

persuasion [πειθουσ δηµιουργοσ] […] (452 e - 453 a).

But, as Socrates argues, other arts also convince or persuade us of things. Arithmetic

persuasion is, for example, 'that which teaches about the odd and the even' (453 e). In order to

distinguish the persuasion brought about by rhetoric and that brought about by arithmetic,

145A similar demonstration is found in Protagoras 312 d.

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Socrates resorts to the distinction between knowledge and opinion. The terms contrasted by

Socrates here are phistis for belief, and epistèmè for knowledge. The distinction lies, as it

does for opinion (doxa) and knowledge (gnohsis), that there can be a true and a false belief,

but only a true knowledge (454 d-e). The persuasion brought about by rhetoric is of the kind

that issues in belief rather than knowledge: 'Then rhetoric is apparently the creator of a

conviction [πειθουσ] that is persuasive [πιστεντικεσ − lit. resulting in belief] but not

instructive about right and wrong' (455 a).146 Already, the analogies between the poet whose

146This argument is complicated by the hierarchy of knowledge elaborated in Republic VI, which

Socrates makes in the course of distinguishing noesis from dianoia, or the knowledge of the

supersensible from that of the visible (this distinction, of course, forms the basis for Kant's distinction

between Reason and Understanding, and is carried over into Husserl) (509 d - 511 e). Beneath them are

ranked Belief (phistis) and then Imagination (eikasia). But as we have seen, belief is the part of the soul

which is affected by images, whether it is the belief (doxa) of the Republic, or the belief (phistis) of the

Sophist. The lowest form of visible knowledge, Socrates says, 'consists of images [εικονεσ]. And by

images [εικονασ] I mean, first, shadows [σκια], then reflections [φαντασµατα] in water and in all close-

packed, smooth, and shiny materials [οσα], and everything of that sort' (509 d-e). Here, to complicate

matters further, eikons describe that which elsewhere is distinguished from them, namely phantasma

(which Chambry translates as 'phantomes'); implicitly, eikon is used here to describe an eidolon, both

because Bk. X uses reflections in the water to describe the work of the imitator, and because of the

emphasis on the material in which the reflection appears, which might describe a mirror. Socrates goes

on to say that objects in the sensible world are the originals of these images (510 a), and dianoia 'us[es]

as images [εικοσιν] the things which were imitated [µιµηθεισιν] before' (i.e. objects of the sensible

world) (510 b). Eikon is being used here, uncharacteristically, to describe not a particular class of entity

but a relative one. The objects of each class of knowledge relate to those of the class of knowledge

immediately beneath them as model to image. This use of the word is quite close to the underlying

assumption, discussed in § 1, that all knowledge of alètheia is a form of eikonography, even that of the

philosophers. Filip Karfik makes a similar point ( see below § 7 n and the typescript of Dr. Karfik's

paper 'Plato and the Religious meaning of the Word Εικων' in Appendix II of this thesis). But why then,
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imitations of appearances influences men's opinions, and the rhetorician whose words

persuade people of beliefs should be apparent. We find confirmation of this in the Phaedrus,

where the rhetorician is described as someone who hunts after doxas (meaning both opinion

and appearance here) without knowing the truth: 'In that case, my friend, anyone who does

not know the truth, but has made it his business to hunt down appearances [δοξασ], will give

us a science of speech which is, so it seems, ridiculously unscientific'.147

After establishing that the rhetorician persuades in the Gorgias, Socrates rephrases

his question about the role of the rhetorician: when do we ask the rhetorician to persuade us,

since on each subject there will always be an expert who knows the truth about the subject

and will therefore be more useful (455 a-d)? Gorgias answers that in fact it is to rhetoricians

that people have recourse in the first instance, precisely because the power of persuasion is

more effective than the knowledge of truth (456 b-d). What follows is a complicated

argument in which Gorgias first asserts that rhetoricians cannot be blamed if their pupils do

evil things (456 d - 457 e). Socrates then argues that if a rhetorician can teach the ability to

persuade people of right and wrong, he must have knowledge of right and wrong (459 d-e),

in the context of this generalised eikonicity, is the iconographic faculty (eikasia) so far devalorised that

it is ranked below phistis, which, after all, is the faculty which is affected by sophistical imagery? Is

there an inconsistency in Plato's argument, with phistis ranked above doxa in this passage of the

Republic, and as equivalent to it in the Sophist? Or, alternatively, is the faculty of producing

eikons ranked below the part of the soul it affects? We must leave this question open.

147Phaedrus. Bilingual ed. Trans. C. J. Rowe. London: Aris and Phillips, 1986. 262 c. Rowe's

translation has been preferred both to the more poetic Hackforth (1952) (Collected Dialogues 475-525),

and to the more up-to-the-minute Nehamas and Woodruff (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1995)

on account of its greater proximity to the Greek original, and its greater faithfulness to the dialogue as

argument (the other translations are more concerned with its poetic/narrative performance). Reference is
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and that someone who knows the just must therefore become just himself (460 b-e).

Consequently, argues Socrates, Gorgias contradicts himself, because he is forced to assert on

one hand that the rhetorician cannot be blamed for the evil of his pupils, but on the other that

his teaching cannot but make his pupils good (461 a-b). One possible rejoinder available to

Gorgias would be to argue that it is possible to persuade without knowing the truth. At this

point in the dialogue, however, Polus takes over the argument from Gorgias, and the question

of the relationship between knowledge and opinion is left to one side. Before following

Socrates's argument with Polus then, we shall turn to the discussion of rhetoric in the

Phaedrus, which deals directly with this subject.

Phaedrus. What I have heard about this, my dear Socrates, is that there is no necessity

for the man who intends to be an orator to understand what is really just, but only

what would appear [δοξαντ] so to the majority of those who will give judgement, and

not what is really good or fine but whatever will appear [δοξει] so; because

persuasion [πειθειν] comes from that and not from the truth (Phaedrus 260 a).

Note again that the persuasion (peithein) of the rhetorician affects the opinions

(doxas) in the same way as it does the belief. The question is again whether it is possible to

persuade without knowing the truth, but only what appears true. Socrates begins by arguing

that rhetoric, 'is not a science [τεχνη] but an unscientific knack [ατεχνοσ τριβη]' (260 e).

Socrates demonstrates this first by stating that in order to convince people that what is not

just is just the rhetorician must be able to deceive (and undeceive) people, and 'make

everything which is capable of being made to resemble [οµοιουν] something else resemble

everything which it is capable of being made to resemble, and to bring it to light when

also made to the scrupulous if at times overdetermined Phèdre. Trans. and ed. Léon Robin. Œuvres

complètes de Platon IV iii (1933).

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someone else makes one thing resemble another and disguises [αποκρυπτοµενον] it' (261 e).

Socrates then examines the conditions of such deception:

Socrates. Does deception come about more in the case of things which are widely

different or in things which differ little?

Phaedrus. In those which differ little.

Socrates. Now when you are passing over from one thing to its opposite you

will be more likely to escape detection if you take small steps than if you take large

ones (261 e - 262 a).

Because of this, a person who wishes to deceive must have a precise knowledge of the truth

in order to measure the steps he takes away from it (262 a-c).

Socrates then demonstrates at length how Lysias's speech is unscientific (262 c - 264

e), before giving an equally lengthy account of how the best elements in the other speeches

were the result of dialectic (265 a - 266 c). This leads to a consideration of what rhetoric is

capable of which cannot be ascribed to dialectic (266 d). Socrates and Phaedrus exhaustively

list various rhetorical devices (266 d - 267 e). What then follows is a precision as to the

power of rhetoric which is relevant to our discussion. Socrates compares the rhetorician to

someone who knows how to apply certain remedies, but not the circumstances in which to

apply them (268 a-c), and to someone who knows how to compose dramatic speeches, but not

how to organise them into a play. He responds to Phaedrus's derision of such people by

offering them the same consolation offered in Republic V to those who opined without

knowing:

But I don't think they [the experts] would abuse him too coarsely; just as a musical

expert, if he met someone who thought he knew all about harmony just because he
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happened to know how to produce the highest and the lowest notes on a string, would

not say fiercely 'You're off your head you wretch' but 'My dear fellow, the person

who is going to be an expert in harmony must certainly know that, but there is

nothing to prevent someone in your condition from having not the slightest

understanding of harmony; for what you know is what has to be learned before

harmony itself, not the elements of harmony as such' (268 d-e).

Like opinion, the rhetorician's art is halfway between ignorance and knowledge. This

description also fleshes out what Socrates meant earlier by an unscientific knack. He means

precisely that ability to know the elements of a craft, but not their application. Thus the

science which is needed in order to persuade is dialectic, what the rhetoricians possess is not

the science, but 'the necessary preliminaries to the science' (269 c).148 Thus, we see in the

Phaedrus that persuasion without knowledge is inferior to persuasion with knowledge, but

not for that matter impossible. Like opinion and appearance, it is merely second best; like

opinion and appearance, it will sometimes hit on the truth, but only does so randomly.

The characterisation of the rhetorician's ability as a knack will lead us back to the

Gorgias. When Polus asks Socrates what sort of art he holds rhetoric to be, Socrates answers

that it is 'no art at all' (462 b), but 'a kind of routine [Εµπειριαν; an empirical procedure]' (462

c). The statement that rhetoric is a routine is similar to its description as a knack (tribè).

Socrates calls rhetoric the art of flattery, and says that cooking is another art of flattery: they

are not identical arts, but 'each is part of the same activity' (462 e). Socrates says of cooking

that it 'is considered an art, but in my judgement is […] only a routine [εµπειρια] and a knack

[τριβη]' (463 b). So without explicitly answering the suspended question of whether it is

possible to persuade without knowledge, Socrates describes rhetoric with the same words

148The Athenian makes a similar point in the Laws IV, 720 a-e, and compares the preliminaries to

knowledge to the poetic exemplification and embellishment of the Laws.

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used in the Phaedrus to describe an inferior art of persuasion which persuades without

knowledge. And the routine carried out by rhetoric is '[o]ne that produces gratification

[χαριτοσ] and pleasure [ηδονησ]' (462 e) says Socrates. Later, he reaffirms the view

expressed in Republic that the aim of poetry and tragedy is also gratification:

Callicles. […] [Poetry's] impulse is rather toward pleasure [ηδονην] and the

gratification [χαριζεσθαι] of her spectators.

Socrates. And did we not just now describe such an activity as flattery

[κολακειαν]?

Callicles. Certainly (Gorgias 502 c).

Like the poet's imitation, the persuasion through appearances carried out by the sophist

results in sensual gratification. Socrates indeed makes the connection between the poet and

the sophist explicit.

Socrates. Well now, if you should strip from all poetry its music, rhythm, and meter,

the residue should be nothing else but speech?

Callicles. That must be so.

Socrates. And these speeches are addressed to a huge mob of people?

Callicles. I agree.

Socrates. Then poetry is a kind of public address?

Callicles. Evidently.

Socrates. Must it not be a rhetorical public address? Do you not think that the

poets engage in rhetoric in the theatres?

Callicles. I do (502 c-d; my emphasis).

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The poet, according to this logic, is a special kind of Sophist.149 Once this particular poetry is

stripped of its music, meter and harmony, it is nothing but rhetoric.

4. Concealment, Deception and Exile

Before examining a portrayal by Plato of the poet as different from the Sophist, particularly

in the Ion, Phaedrus, and Symposium, we must examine the definition of mimesis as

deceptive impersonation toward which the concept of the poet as Sophist directs us. In the

course of demonstrating that rhetoric and sophistry are a form of flattery, Socrates underlines

an important feature of flattery relevant to his criticism of the poet in the Republic:

There are then these four arts which always minister to what is best, one pair for the

body, the other for the soul. But flattery [κολακευτικη], perceiving this - I do not say

by knowledge but by conjecture - has divided herself also into four branches, and

insinuating herself into the guise of each of these parts, pretends [προσποιειται]150 to

be that which she impersonates [υπεδυ]. And having no thought [ουδεν φροντιζει] for

what is best, she regularly uses pleasure as a bait to catch folly [ανοιαν] and deceives

[εξαπατα] it into believing that she is of supreme worth [αξια] (Gorgias 464 c-d).

The art of rhetoric and sophistry, under which are gathered the key terms of persuasion,

opinion, appearance, desire, gratification and pleasure that we have just examined, are also

characterised by their ability to deceive on the subject of their essence and to impersonate the

149The analogies between this sophist poet and the poet condemned at the end of Republic are

confirmed by this diatribe by Socrates against the poet there (601 a-b).

150The full sense of prospoieitai is stronger than 'impersonate', which corresponds to definitions II. 3-5.

It also means 'to attach to oneself, to gain' (II.1), and 'to take what does not belong to one' (II.2). We

shall see how the Sophist's impersonation also involves a form of depropriation and usurpation.
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good. The essence of this deception is that something which is not the truth passes itself as

such, that the copy passes itself off for the model. This is the principal risk mimesis involves

for Plato, and also what constitutes its elusiveness for philosophy.151 The Sophist is occupied

with defining the Sophist in the face of this difficulty. Thaetetus: 'by this time the Sophist has

appeared in so many guises [πολλα πεφανθαι] that for my part I am puzzled [απορο] to see

what description one is to maintain as truly expressing [αληθη λεγοντα] his real nature

[οντοσ ειναι]' (Sophist 231 c). The Stranger begins his attempt to define the Sophist by

comparing him to something more familiar, namely an angler (218 d-e). The Stranger goes

out of his way to make the choice of the angler seem as random as possible, but the

motivation of his choice becomes apparent later. Socrates distinguishes the productive and

the acquisitive arts, then acquisition by force from voluntary exchange, after which he draws

an important distinction for our argument between two kinds of acquisition by force: 'Open

force may be called fighting, and secret [κπυθαιον] force may have the general name of

hunting [φηρεντικον]' (219 e). The angler falls into the latter category, as does later the

Sophist: both are hunters (221 d). As well as being someone who is difficult to define, the

Sophist is characterised as someone who uses concealed force. And that force is used in order

to acquire the goods of other people. The full semantic range of prospieitai is active in the

Sophist, who by concealing himself and impersonating others is able to dispossess them.

After a variety of distinctions which need not detain us, Plato rehearses the familiar

definition of the Sophist as possessing only apparent [δοξαστικην] knowledge (233 c).

According to the logic we have already examined, this leads to the characterisation of the

Sophist as an imitator:

Stranger. But about the Sophist, tell me, is it not clear that he is a sort of wizard

[γοητων], an imitator [µιµητησ] of real things [των οντων] […]

151Cf. 'Typographie' 245-247.

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Thaetetus. […] It is clear enough from what has been said that he is one

whose province is play [παιδιασ].

Stranger. Then we may class him as a wizard [γοητα] and an imitator of

some sort (234 e - 235 a).

This is almost identical to the description of the poet in Republic X: the person who believes

that the imitator really knows the crafts he is imitating 'has apparently encountered some sort

of magician [γοητι] or imitator' (598 d).152 The imitation characteristic of Sophist and poet

makes them a kind of wizard. And, as in Republic X 602 b and Laws II 667 e (cf. above § 2

and below § 5 n), this particular form of trickery is characterised as a game. But in the

Sophist, a different aspect of the Sophist's wizardry is developed, which is concealed in

Republic X, and which develops from the definition of the Sophist as impersonator. Plato

defines him as someone hard to define, and this attempt takes place within a generalised

system of concealment.153 The description of the attempt to define the Sophist as a hunt is

not fortuitous: the Stranger earlier assesses the definition of the Sophist as an imitator in

these terms: 'Come then, it is not for us to see that we do not relax in pursuit of our quarry

[θερα]. We may say that we have him enveloped in such a net as argument provides for

hunting of this sort' (235 b). The attempt to flush the Sophist out of hiding must use the same

concealed force with which he hides himself. This difficulty reflects the generalised difficulty

of defining something one of whose characteristics is to be difficult to define.154

152This similarity is also noticed in Méchoulan, 'Théoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 143 and 151 n

10, and undermines somewhat the ready distinction between Plato's middle 'poetical' dialogues, and

late, philosophical (according to an anemic, analytic concept of philosophy) ones.

153Cf. Sophist 235 b-c.

154A similar problem also affects the definition of mimesis in Republic X, but in a concealed manner

which is only revealed by the work of interpretation (cf. 'Typographie' 245-246). The attempt to hunt

the Sophist is similar to the Republic's mimesis of the mimètes as mirror-bearer.

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It as this point that Plato makes the distinction we examined earlier between

eikon and phantasma. This the Sophist can counter by denying that there is such a thing as an

image, using a similar sophistical argument to the one used in the Cratylus to deny that a

name could be inaccurate. Stranger:

This 'appearing' [φαινεσθαι] or 'seeming' [δοκειν] without really 'being', and the

saying of something which yet is not true - all these expressions have always been

and always still are deeply involved in perplexity. It is extremely hard, Thaetetus, to

find correct terms in which one may say or think that falsehoods have a real

existence, without being caught in contradiction by the mere utterance of words (236

e - 237 a).

The philosopher's participation in the hunt brings about the "semblance" of a reversal of roles

between the philosopher and the Sophist. The philosopher is forced to affirm the existence of

falsehood in order to condemn it, whereas the Sophist attempts to deny its existence in order

to protect it. Because of these difficulties, 'the Sophist with extreme cunning has found an

impenetrable [απορον] lurking place' (239 c). Socrates first proves that it is possible for

something to be in one sense and not to be in another with an intricate argument.155 Thus, a

155(a) '[T]he kinds [of ideal things such as reality] blend with one another, (b) […] existence and

difference pervade them all, and pervade one another, (c) […] difference [or the different], by partaking

of existence, is by virtue of that participation, but on the other hand is not that existence of which it

partakes, but is different, and since it is different from existence [or an existent], quite clearly it must be

possible that it should be a thing that is not, (d) and again, existence, having a part in difference, will be

different from all the rest of the kinds, and, because it is different from them all, it is not any one of

them nor yet all the others put together, but is only itself, with the consequence, again indisputable, that
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false statement is a statement of what is not the case, and therefore on one level 'is not', but

on another is as a statement. Having demonstrated that a false assertion is possible, he argues

that it is because of this that both good images and bad are possible:

Stranger. And if falsity [ψευδουσ] exists, deception [απατη] is possible.

Thaetetus. Yes.

Stranger. And once deception [αππατησ] exists, images [ειδωλων] and

likenesses [εικονων] and appearances [φαντασιασ] will everywhere be rampant (260

c).

As we saw in the Cratylus, images (icons) cannot possibly be completely true, or else they

wouldn't be images. But within this general space of deception, the Sophist's is particularly

and pre-eminently deceptive (cf. 261 a). The difficulties of defining the Sophist are not

exhaustively treated out of mere didacticism, but in order to situate the Sophist within the

general sphere of falsity. His ability to make images are connected with a general ability to

hide, to conceal, to deceive.

It is according to this logic that the Stranger draws his final distinction:

Stranger. There is a semblance produced by means of tools, and another sort where

the producer of the semblance takes his own person as instrument.

Thaetetus. How do you mean?

existence is not myriads upon myriads of things, and that all other kinds in the same way, whether taken

severally or all together, in many respects are and in many respects are not' (Sophist 259 a-b).
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Stranger. When someone uses his own person or voice to counterfeit your

traits or speech, the proper name for creating such semblance is, I take it, mimicry

[µιµησισ]' (267 a).156

This is the final element in the definition of the Sophist. Stranger: 'The art of contradiction

making, descended from an insincere [ειπωνικου] kind of conceited mimicry [µιµητικον], of

the semblance-making breed [φανταστικου], derived from image making [ειδωλοποικησ],

distinguished as a portion, not divine but human, of production, that presents a shadow play

of words [αφορισµηνον] - such are the blood and lineage which can, with perfect truth, be

assigned to the authentic Sophist' (268 c-d). All the elements common to both Sophist and

poet here go hand in hand with an indictment of deceit on moral lines. And the focal point of

this attack is not just imitation in the generalised sense, but of mimicry or impersonation, of a

particular type of imitation which attempts to substitute itself for the thing it imitates. And

the form which this mimicry takes which is condemned in particular is the imitation

(mimicry) by flattery of goodness, by the Sophist of the philosopher: 'We cannot call him

wise, because we set him down as ignorant, but as a mimic [µιµητησ] of the wise man he will

clearly assume a title derived from his' (268 b).157

156This is the definition of mimesis with which Plato distinguishes it from diègesis in Republic III. Cf.

'Typographie' 263-268.

157This condemnation corresponds to the assumption that the work of the poet is an imitation (and not

an object in its own right), because its vocation is to pass itself off for that which it imitates. This aspect

of Plato's condemnation is the subject of Eric Méchoulan's 'Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa', where

he argues that Plato opposes a theory of nomination, in which what is proper to each kind of being is

designated by a particular name, to mimesis, which has no proper essence, or whose "essence" is to

pretend to have the essence proper to other things (146/143). The nominative concept of language

which we discussed in § 1 in relation to the Cratylus is what enables Plato (and Heidegger) to decide

about mimesis in Republic X, whereas the concept of mimesis as impersonation (which is habitually
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In the Sophist, the Sophist is given the characteristics of both the poet in Republic II-

III and in Republic X. Like the mirror-bearer in X, he can create anything easily because what

he creates has no relation to the truth of the object, and the role of this untruthful imitation is

gratification. But like the poet in II-III, he is also defined as substituting himself for someone

or something else. According to what principle then can one link the two? As disinstalled

truth, poetry is defined in terms of the faculties to which it appeals, namely weaker faculties

though wrongly restricted to Republic II-III), with which Méchoulan is concerned and which we are

discussing in this section, makes that decision problematical. Méchoulan grounds Plato's attempt to

define mimesis in an historical change in the meaning of theoria, from its definition as a perception

(aisthesis) which is validated by society, to that of a contemplation of abstract ideas validated by logic

(particularly the principle of non-contradiction) (138-139/134-135). Aesthesis loses its former relation

to theoria with this change, to which it becomes opposed by Plato, who thinks of the senses as

absolutely hetereogenous to the theoretical contemplation of the ideas (140-141). Mimesis, Méchoulan

argues in relation to Republic X (and following for the moment Heidegger's analysis in Nietzsche), must

be condemned by Plato because it makes sensual imitations of the sensible appearances of objects (142-

143/138-139). But unlike Heidegger, who argues that mimesis consequently becomes a (deformed)

form of creation for Plato, Méchoulan argues that aesthesis ignores the idea and is absolutely

heterogeneous to it; it exists purely in the realm of the senses with no relation to the ideas. Distance

from the idea is what gives each being its proper definition, according to Plato-Heidegger, but mimesis,

as that which has no proper definition, cannot be defined in terms of distance from the idea. At the same

time, mimesis passes itself off for the very ideas to which it is completely unrelated (144-145/141-143).

It therefore undermines the attempt by philosophy to define all things in relation to the ideas, and

threatens the possibility of an existence grounded in a living together in relation to those ideas. Plato is

forced strategically to describe it (as Plato-Heidegger does) as an alteration of Being, in order to

neutralise this threat (148/146). The only thing I would fault in this analysis is the fact that it does not

consider those dialogues in which Plato recuperates the senses and relates them to the divine. The main
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than knowledge (gnohsis or epistème), which nonetheless relate to it, faculties which differ

from and defer to knowledge. The problem with mimesis as impersonation for Plato(-

Heidegger) is that it upsets this hierarchy, and makes the perceptions of the inferior faculty

pass themselves off for those of the superior. Heidegger-Plato's gesture in Republic X -

Nietzsche I was to put the perceptions of the weaker faculty in their proper place, to assert a

principle according to which the lower perceptions can always be distinguished from the

higher. Lacoue-Labarthe's argument was that this definition of the poet was a representation,

and employed mimesis as substitutive impersonation in order to make its point (or deceive us

into believing that it had).

What underlies Plato's gesture, and makes it necessary, is the fact, explicitly

formulated by deconstruction, that all perceptions necessarily involve seeing something as

something else. Accurate perceptions require this substitution as the condition of their

possibility. This is not to deny the validity of a distinction between different kinds of

perceptions, or to argue that our perception of a crooked drinking straw in our glass is as

accurate as our knowledge that this is an optical illusion, but only the recognition that both

kinds of perception function according to the same law of substitution.158 In the Sophist, the

final definition of the Sophist is that of someone who can appear as something else; his

ability to create anything (Book X) is explained in terms of its ability to impersonate (Book

III). The Sophist reverses the order of the Republic, by presenting poetry as impersonation is

the truth of poetry as disinstallation. And in so doing, it anticipates in a certain manner both

Lacoue-Labarthe and Heidegger.

example of this is of course the Phaedrus, also marginalised by Lacoue-Labarthe, and which we shall

consider below.

158One should not, of course, confuse this with any representative theory of knowledge.
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The paradoxical conclusion to which this argument leads is that the Sophist's only

property is impropriety,159 and that this "characteristic" underlies the aesthetic concept of

poetry (as emotion and opinion). What this implies is that Plato, particularly in the Republic,

is able to describe depropriation as a fundamental characteristic of poetry. We shall examine

this description in order to show that each aspect of the depropriation which Plato criticises

in the poet-Sophist is revalorised in his portrayal of the inspired poet.

[Socrates]. Now, to make oneself like [οµοιουν] someone else in voice or appearance

is to imitate [µιµεισθαι] the person one makes oneself like [οµοιοι].

[Adeimantus]. Certainly.

[S]. In these passages, then, it seems that he and the other poets effect their

narrative through imitation [µιµησεωσ].

[A]. That's right.

[S]. If the poet never hid [αποκρυπτοιτο] himself, the whole of his poem

would be narrative without imitation [µιµησεωσ] (Republic III, 393 c-d).

The problem envisaged by Socrates at this point is the obverse of that discussed by the

Stranger in the Sophist: instead of being imitated, the guardians might become imitators.

Socrates:

159Cf. Kant Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798) Pt. II, 'Of the Qualities which merely

result from the Fact that Man has a Character [Charakter] or is without one.' Werkausgabe. Ed.

Wilhelm Weischedel. 12 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. XII, 397-690 (trans. based on

Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique. Trans. and ed. Michel Foucault. Second ed. Paris: Vrin,

1970): '1) The imitator [Nachahmer] (in the moral domain) is without character: character consists in

the originality of the manner of thinking' (635/ Foucault trans. 140).

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Then consider, Adeimantus, whether our guardians should be imitators or not. Or

does that not follow from our earlier statement that each individual would do a fine

job of one occupation, not of many, and that if he tried the latter and dabbled in many

things, he'd surely fail to achieve distinction in any of them? (394 e).

The problem of concealment becomes thus a social problem.160 The kind of mimicry

which accompanies this dissimulation is one which impairs the efficient functioning of the

city.161 But the apparently practical imperative of specialisation has a more fundamental

implication: 'no one in our city is two or more people simultaneously, since each does only

one job' (III 397 d). The mimic is involved in a form of transgression because he transgresses

the boundaries of his own identity as a person in order to become two people. In the course of

prescribing a moral code for the poetry which is used to educate the young in the ideal polis,

Socrates articulates in detail the link between mimicry and this particular form of

transgression. Here Socrates is legislating on the admissible ways to portray a god in poetry:

'Do you think that a god is a sorcerer [γοητα], able to appear [φαντασεσθαι] in different forms

[αλλαισ ιδεαισ],162 sometimes changing himself from his own form

[αλλατοντα το αυτου ειδοσ] into many shapes [πολλασ µορφασ], sometimes deceiving

[απατωντα] us by making us think that he has done it? Or do you think he's simple and least

likely to step out of his own form [eautou ιδεασ]?' (II 380 d). On the face of it, the arguments

160This point of course relates to Girard's analysis of the Republic (cf. 'Typographie' 230-233).

Méchoulan also makes the point that mimesis' ability to impersonate other trades and other people

threatens the being in community ('Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 144-145/141).

161Socrates also condemns variety in rhythm (397 b sq.), food (404 b sq.) and medicine (405 d sq.). We

find similar condemnations in the Laws, where poets are criticised for being too fond of presenting a

theme with a medley of voices and noises (II, 669 d), imitating the flute on the harp (III, 700 e) and

imitating a wide variety of contrasting characters (IV, 719 c-e).

162Grube and Reeve ad ' at different times', for which there is no counterpart in the Greek.
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for the guardians and the gods not changing are the same: 'It is impossible, then, for the gods

to want to alter themselves [εθελειν αυτου αλλοιουν]? Since they are the most beautiful and

best possible, it seems that each unconditionally retains his own shape [µορφη]' (381 c).

Because they are the best, any change can only worsen them. But the change would also

involve the god in deceit, and make him like a goèta, the wizard or sorcerer to which the

Sophist and the poet are likened, precisely because of their power to deceptively impersonate

many different kinds of people.

And this deception is specifically described like a transgression of boundaries: the

god would 'step out of [εκβαινειν] his own form.'163 The analogy is underlined when Socrates

gives the first illustration of poetry which presents gods changing their appearance: 'Then let

no poet tell us about Proteus or Thetis, or say that "The gods, in likeness of strangers from

foreign lands,/ Adopt every sort of shape and visit our cities"' (381 d). The gods must not be

portrayed as Sophists. The punishment which is meted out to the poet in 398 a anticipates - in

the fine treatment he receives before being sent away - the banishment of the poet in Republic

X.

[Socrates]. It seems then, that if a man, who through clever training can become

anything and imitate anything, should arrive in our city, wanting to give a

performance of his poems, we should bow down [προσκυνοιµεν] before him as

someone holy [ιερον], wonderful [θαυµαστον], and pleasing [ηδυν], but we should

tell him that there is no one like him in our city and that it isn't lawful for there to be.

We should pour myrrh [µυρον] on his head, crown him with wreaths, and send him

away [αποπεµποιµεν] to another city (398 a).

163It is in view of this that Socrates is impelled to say that 'there is nothing of the false poet in a god'

(Republic II, 382 d).

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The ability to impersonate others which leads him outside of his person is punished by exile

from the city; the imitative poet who does not remain within the boundaries of his person will

not be allowed to remain within the boundaries of any city.164

The analogies between the mimic transgression and the characterisation of the

Sophist as an outsider need to be traced through Plato's text. The Sophists who take part in

the dialogues are frequently strangers, namely Protagoras (Protagoras 309 c and 313 b) and

his followers (315 a), and Euthydemus and Dionysodorus,165 who were moreover turned out

by the last city they visited (271 c). In the Sophist the Stranger lists the trading of wisdom

between one city and another as one of the activities particular to the Sophist (Sophist 224 a-

c). The indictment of the Sophist by a character referred to as Stranger (xenos - lit. foreigner)

is not a fortuitous irony: just as the philosopher must uphold the existence of falsehood in

order to banish it, so too must he become a stranger in order to expel the stranger. In the

Timaeus Socrates says that Sophists will be unable to sing the praises of the ideal city

because they are wanderers, and have no attachment to any particular city.166 Socrates also

discusses a particular kind of Sophist who attempts to combine the roles of politician and

philosopher as a 'frontiersman between philosophy and politics' (Euthydemus 305 c). Socrates

says of them that their account 'looks well rather than truly is well. For it is not easy to

164This punishment is meted out to the poet again in Laws VII, 800 e, 817 a sq. and XI, 935 e. In Book

IV, Socrates makes the analogies between the person and the city explicit: 'Then is it [the spirited part]

also different from the rational part, or is it some form of it, so that there are two parts in the soul […]

instead of three? Or rather, just as there were three classes in the city that held it together [my

emphasis] the money-making, the auxiliary, and the deliberative, is the spirited part a third thing in the

soul that is by nature the helper of the rational part […]?' (440 e - 441 a).

165Euthydemus 271 b. Trans. W. H. D. Rouse (1976). Collected Dialogues. 385-420.

166Timaeus 19 e. Trans. Benjamin Jowett (1871). Collected Dialogues. 1151-1211.

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persuade them what is the truth about these borderlands' (306 a), and this for the same reason

that attempting to practice several crafts is condemned in Republic.

The connection between the effects of the poet/Sophist's art and the violation of

frontiers runs through the Republic. The gratification of desires is responsible for wars which

lead cities to overrun each others' frontiers (Republic 373 d sq.). The unworthy philosophers

who think they can practice philosophy without the necessary abilities (and whose thoughts

and opinions are 'sophisms' [496 a]) are like a mixture between a jailbird and a gatecrasher:

'like prisoners escaping from jail to take refuge in a temple' (495 d). The particular form of

imitation which is commonly translated by mimicry thus makes the poet participate in a kind

of deception which is intimately linked to transgression of personal boundaries. He shares

this deception with the Sophist who is himself a figure characterised by exile. The

banishment of the poet and the specific critique of imitative poetry within the set of imitative

arts in general are both dependent on the definition of the poet as Sophist which takes place

in Republic. The mimicry which underlies mimesis is defined as both a kind of impropriety

and displacement, and as a kind of passivity. What we shall now see is that these

characteristics also apply to the inspired poet which Plato ranks above the Sophist.

5. Eikonomics

That objects should be imitated in letters and syllables, and so find expression, may

appear ridiculous, Hermogenes, but it cannot be avoided - there is no better principle

to which we can look for the truth of first [i.e. primary] names. Deprived of this, we

must have recourse to divine help, like the tragic poets, who in any perplexity have

their gods waiting in the air, and must get out of our difficulty in like fashion, by

saying that 'the gods give first names, and therefore they are right' (Cratylus 425 d-e).
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Although Socrates mocks this particular form of deus ex machina here, the alternative

between imitation and divine gift he describes is present in a different form elsewhere in his

dialogues. As we saw earlier, poets are described throughout certain strands of Plato's text as

participating in a kind of imitation, but one which is inferior to the kind of imitation involved

in naming. This inferior imitation is ascribed to the Sophist and the poet in the Gorgias and

Republic respectively, after a demonstration that neither is a craftsman able to participate in

the imitation valorised in the Cratylus. A similar exclusion affects the poet in the Ion, but the

resulting characterisation of the poet is much closer to the alternative envisaged in Cratylus

425 d-e than to that developed at the end of Republic. Socrates tells Ion:

This gift you have of speaking well on Homer is not an art; it is a power divine

[θεια δε δυναµισ], impelling you [κινει]167 like the power in the stone Euripides calls

a magnet […]. This stone does not simply attract the iron rings, just by themselves; it

also imparts to the rings a force [δυναµιν] enabling them to create the same effect as

the stone itself [ποιειν οπερ η λιθοσ; trans. modified],168 that is, to attract another

ring, so that sometimes a chain is formed, quite a long one, of iron rings suspended

from one another. […] Just so the Muse. She first makes men inspired [ενθεουσ], and

then through these inspired [ενθεων] ones others share in the inspiration

[ενθουσιαζοντων], and a chain is formed, for the epic poets […] have their

167'She jerks you' ('Elle te met en branle') (Ion. Trans. Louis Méridier. Œuvres complètes Vi (1931).

29-47.

168The translation with 'do the same thing as the stone itself' is correct, and poiein is regularly used in

Greek to describe creation in general, without restricting it to the poet. But the Greek poiein reinforces

the comparison between the Muse and the magnet by describing what the stone 'does' with the same

word as that which is applied in its restricted sense to the activity of the poet.
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excellence, not from art, but are inspired [ενθεοι], possessed [κατεχοµενοι], and thus

they utter all these admirable poems (Ion 533 d-e).169

Although Socrates will not countenance the argument that names are given by the gods, he

argues that poetry may be just such a gift. This suggests that the condemnation of the tragic

poet's solution in the Cratylus is not condemned in itself, but only because it is applied to the

world of naming and of craft to which it is heterogeneous (as is made clear by Socrates in the

Ion). Descriptions of inspiration analogous to that in the Ion are found repeatedly in

subsequent accounts of artistic creativity, particularly those with which this thesis will

concern itself.

It would seem as though two characterisations of the poet can be found in Plato's text,

one mimetic and sophistic, the other inspired. The inspired poet cannot be accused on the

same score as the mimetic one, which is why it is not surprising to find an implication that

the Ion is not a serious dialogue, or not consonant with Plato's serious corpus, because of

Socrates's benevolence toward the poet in that dialogue: 'In this little dialogue Plato is

amusing himself […]. [Ion's] naïve and complete self-satisfaction is amusingly contrasted

with Socrates' very gentle irony. Ion is no antagonist to draw down upon him anything more

drastic. Socrates treats him most gently and he feels as self-satisfied at the end as he did at

the beginning.'170 Just as a certain strand of Plato's thinking regards poetry as a game

(paidia), Hamilton describes a dialogue in which Plato suggests that poetry might be more

than mimicry as one in which he amuses himself, plays, paidia.171 I would like to take the

169Trans. modified: Cooper translates enthousiazontohn as 'enthusiasm'.

170Edith Hamilton. Introduction to the Ion. Collected Dialogues 215.

171For a similar discussion of the Ion and Hamilton's reading of it cf. Mihai Spariosu. 'Plato's Ion:

Mimesis, Poetry and Power.' Mimesis, Semiosis and Power. Ed. Ronald Bogue. Mimesis in
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Ion's games seriously, and follow the way in which the inspired poet is presented by Plato as

an alternative to the sophist-poet. The respect and regret with which the imitative poet is

banished in the Republic are traces of the inspired poet; the possibility that the poet might be

allowed to return at some point, which is left open by Socrates at the end of the Republic, is

perhaps an oblique reference to the inspired poet (whom Socrates does not discuss in the

Republic).

Inspiration defines a realm in which the arts have no jurisdiction and in which

mimesis does not figure. In one movement Plato emancipates the poet from any commerce

with the practical world, and any need to imitate the real world. The key to Plato's analysis of

the poet's role is inspiration; it is inspiration which makes a use of language that need not

imitate reality - and hence a role for the poet - possible. But this key term enjoys only a

vestigial existence in the dialogue. Although Socrates says that poetry is the product of

inspiration, he analyses every line quoted in the Ion (as with the example of Hecamede's

broth) as if it were a realistic written account of an art (e.g. the art of medicine).172 The text

continually refers to inspiration, but nowhere is there an actual example of what the result of

inspiration might be in practice. The language of the dialogue is congenitally unable to give

an example of inspiration because inspiration is by definition the thing which exceeds its

scope. Inspiration therefore cannot be made present in the dialogue; it can only be alluded to.

It is that which is necessarily absent from the dialogue's mimetic, realistic discourse.

Predictably, the key term in Plato's attempt to find a space for poetry is the weakest in the

dialogue.

Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach: 2 vols. Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1984 and

1991. II (1991), 13-26.

172We find a similar tendency in other attempts by Socrates at literary criticism (Protagoras 340 b, 343

d and 346 a).

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To examine Plato's concept of inspiration it is necessary to turn once more to the

Phaedrus. The first of the three speeches on love in the Phaedrus, that of Lysias which

Phaedrus reads to Socrates (230 d - 234 c), argues that young men (paidikia) should grant

their favors to non-lovers rather than lovers. Lysias's main argument in the non-lover's favour

is that he is disinterested. What we are going to look at is the way in which mimesis is

conceived as reciprocity, not just of an image to its model, but also as a sensual gratification

which must always be exchanged for something else, as the stimulation of an appetite which

causes the social ills of competition and jealousy, and can only be satisfied by exchange.

Inspiration on the other hand is conceived of as transcendent generosity, a gift for which one

receives nothing in return. Our examination of the economics at work in Plato's text will

focus on his opposition between exchange and gift, which governs that between inspired and

mimetic poetry.

Again, those who are in love consider the damage they did to their own interests

[των αυτων]173 because of their love and the services they have performed, and

adding in the labour [πονον] they put in they think they have long since given return

[αποδεδοκεναι χαριν] enough to the object of their love; whereas those not in love

cannot allege neglect of their own interests [οικειων αµελειαν] because of it, nor

reckon up their past labours [πονουσ υπολογιζεσθαι], nor complain of quarrels with

their relatives; so that with all these troubles removed there is nothing left but to

perform eagerly whatever actions they think will please [χαριεισθαι] the other party

(Phaedrus 231 a-b).

The lover, because he is in love, only gives his charis to his beloved so that he can satisfy his

desires. The non-lover, because he has no such desires, is necessarily only concerned with the

well-being of his beloved (232 c-d). The opposition between the two is already contained in
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the semantic range of charin. Its first sense in Lydell and Scott is that of an outward grace,

the fact of being favoured (by nature for example). Its second is the notion of favor as a gift,

for which one does not expect anything in return; both charistos, meaning free gifts and

charisma, meaning free gifts or favors are kindred to this meaning. Definition III is that of a

favor done or received as part of an exchange, with III. 2 reading: 'especially favors granted

by women, sex.' This third sense of charis views it as a calculating rather than a generous act.

The devaluation of the sensual satisfaction provided by sex in the Phaedrus as forming part

of an exchange uses the attitudes contained in charis's semantic range as a resource.

The contrast between objects of exchange and transcendent values, of which we are

now going to give an overview, appears in many of the dialogues.174 In the Republic VI, one

of the defining characteristics of the man of wisdom is his generosity of spirit.

[Socrates]. Then surely such a person is moderate [σωφρων] and not at all a money-

lover [φιλοχρηµατοσ]. It's appropriate for others to take seriously the things for

which money [χρηµα] and large expenditures [δαπανησ] are needed, but not for him.

[…]

If it is at all illiberal [ανελευθεριασ],175 you should not overlook that fact, for

pettiness [σµικρολογια] is altogether incompatible with a soul that is always reaching

out to grasp everything both divine and human as a whole.

173'[I]nterests' supplied by Rowe.

174For a short discussion of this opposition in Greek culture and its relation to Plato's idealistic dualism

cf. Méchoulan, 'Théoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 137-138/131-132).

175Trans. modified. Eleutheros literally means 'free'. Grube and Reeve translate its opposite or its

absence throughout aneleutherias, with 'slavish', which is faithful to part of Plato's meaning, but

Shorey's choice of 'illiberality' better conveys the ungenerous aspect of aneleutheria. Unless otherwise

specified, I have followed throughout Shorey's translation of aneleutheria in this context. Cf. Aristotle's
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[…]

And is there any way that an orderly person, who isn't money loving [φιλοχρηµατοσ],

illiberal [ανελευθεροσ] […], unreliable or unjust [δυσζυµβολοσ]?176 (Republic 485 e

- 486 b).

These remarks tally with the wider and well known subordination of material wealth to

wisdom, of the sensual world to the supersensual, of gratification to wisdom etc.177 The

aspect of this opposition on which it is important to focus here is the location of anything

which might involve exchange and reciprocity in the devalorised half of that opposition.178 A

literary counterpart to this point appears in Book III, where Plato lists the subjects unfit for

essay on liberality (eleutheria) in the Nichomachean Ethics, where the concept is specifically discussed

as an ideal of generosity. Aristotle, although he argues that one should give because it is the right thing

to do, still retains giving within a more generalised system of reciprocity. The essay is discussed in

Jacques Derrida. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (1991). Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1992. 139. Keats also places great importance on liberality: 'The more I know of Men the

more I know how to value liberality in any of them. Thank God there are a great many who will

sacrifice their worldly interest for a friend: I wish there were more who would sacrifice their passions.

The worst of Men are those whose self interests are their passion - the next those whose passions are

their self-interest' ('To Georgiana Keats' (13-28 January 1820) 348. Letters 345-353).

176Shorey translates duszumbolos with 'a driver of hard bargains', while Chambry opts for 'difficile à

vivre ' - 'difficult to live with'.

177Cf. Republic I , 330 d sq., 336 e, VII, 521 a, VIII , 555 e - 556 e, IX, 580 e - 581 d, Symposium. 173

c, Apology 29 e, , 36 a-b, 37 c, 38 a-b. Trans. Hugh Tredennick (1954). The Collected Dialogues of

Plato, including the letters. 3-26, Crito, 45 b, and Phaedo 82 c.

178Exchange of functions between crafts is condemned along analogous lines in the Republic:

''Meddling and exchange [µεταβολη] between these three classes, then, is the greatest harm that can

happen to the city' (IV, 434 b).

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poetic description. After criticising the portrayal of gods and heroes as overpowered by their

emotions, he continues:

It is certain we cannot allow our men to be bribed with gifts [δωροδοκουσ] or to be

money-lovers [φιλοχρηµατουσ].179

[…]

Then the poets mustn't sing to them:

Gifts [δωρα] persuade gods, and gifts [δωρ'] persuade revered kings.

Nor must Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles, be praised as speaking with moderation

when he advises him to take the gifts [δωρα] and defend the Achaens, but not give up

his anger without gifts [δωρων]. […] Nor should we agree that he was such a money-

lover [φιλοχρηµατον] that he would accept gifts [δωρα] of Agamemnon or release the

corpse of Hector for a ransom [τιµην] but not otherwise (Republic III, 390 e).

Dohron means 'gift,' and like charis its semantic range contains performances which are

incompatible with exchange (we will return later to Derrida's discussion of this paradox of

the gift). The word for ransom, timèn, on the other hand, was explicitly used to designate

exchange. Plato here criticises Homer for portraying the gods and heroes as exchanging gifts.

Specifically, it is reciprocity which is aimed at, the fact that the gods or Achilles might only

do something in exchange for something else. Greed and illiberality are not used in a weak

sense in which some exchanges might be considered generous and others not: they are

intrinsic to the very act of exchange. This argument is spread widely throughout the

dialogues. In addition to the educational programme of the guardians in the Republic,

Socrates stipulates that

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Second, none of them shall have a house or storeroom that isn't open for all to enter

at will. Third, whatever sustenance moderate and courageous warrior-athletes require

in order to have neither shortfall nor surplus in a given year they'll receive by

taxation on the other citizens as a salary for their guardianship. […] We'll tell them

that they always have gold and silver of a divine sort in their souls as a gift from the

gods [παρα θεον] and so have no further need of human gold. Indeed, we'll tell them

that it's impious for them to defile this divine possession by any admixture of such

gold, because many impious deeds have been done that involve the currency used by

ordinary people, while their own is pure. Hence, for them alone among the city's

population, it is unlawful to touch or handle gold or silver. […] (Republic III, 416 d -

417 a).

The wage, and all restrictions against the guardian's benefiting monetarily from their

profession, work towards breaking any reciprocity between guardianship and material gain.

Socrates makes a similar remark in Book IX,180 in which he relates the appetitive part of the

soul to profit making (580 d - 581 a), and where the profit-lover becomes a name used almost

by synecdoche to describe all multiform pleasures (582 a - 583 a).

Part of Socrates's critique of Sophists is that they do their work for pay.181 He

presses the point most firmly in the Sophist, where the Stranger first begins to pin

179Order of sentence in Grube and Reeve modified to conform to Greek.

180Cf. Republic IX , 589 d-e.

181Republic VI, 493 a-c, Protagoras 357 d-e and Euthydemus 304 a-c. Cf. also 'La pharmacie de

Platon' 121-122/106-107 and Méchoulan, 'Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 147/144.

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down the elusive Sophist by defining him as someone who182 'hunts man

[ανθρωποθεριασ],183 privately [ιδιοθεριασ], for hire [µισθαρνικησ], taking money in

exchange [νοµισµατοπωλικησ], having the semblance of education - this is termed

Sophistry, and is a hunt after young men of wealth and rank' (Sophist 223 b). The

stranger divides the acquisitive arts into an art concerned with hunting, and another

concerned with 'exchange [αλλακτικον]' (223 c). The art of exchange is then divided,

curiously, into 'giving [δωρητικον]' and 'selling [αγοραστικον]' (223 c). Again, we find

the use of dohron to denote part of an exchange in a dialogue which seeks to identify

exchange with the sophistry which is opposed to the generosity of philosophy. In this

particular context, it seems as though giving, as opposed to selling, merely denotes

bartering. It is within this division that the first clear picture of the Sophist emerges.

We are returning to the Stranger's definition of the Sophist which we followed above

182Or 'which', in Fowler's translation, in which the Sophist is not really a man. The Nietzschean attempt

to virilise aesthetics retains up to a point Plato's critique of sophistry, mimicry, and acting: 'The absurd

irritability of [the hysteric's] system, which turns all experiences into crises and introduces the

"dramatic" into the smallest accidents of life, robs him of calculability: he is no longer a person, at most

a rendezvous of persons and now this one, now that one shoots forward with shameless assurance.

Precisely for this reason, he is a great actor: all these poor will-less people whom doctors study so

closely astonish one with their virtuosity in mimicry, transfiguration, assumption of almost any

desired character' ('The Will to Power as Art' (1885-1888) # 813 (1888), 431. The Will to Power (1883-

1888; 1901). Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York:

Vintage, 1968. Pt. III, iv, 419-453). Cf. also 'Problem of the actor. The "dishonesty," the typical ability

to metamorphose as a flaw in character … The Hanswurst, the clown, the buffo, the Gil Blas, the actor

who plays the artist' ('On the Physiology of Art' # 17/ quoted in Nietzsche Ch. 14, 94; Heidegger's

ellipses) and 'Will to Power as Art' # 829 (1888), 438. References to The Will to Power are made first

to the number of the entry, then to the 1968 edition page number.

183Therias: hunting.
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(§ 4) in order to discuss its economic dimension. The Stranger further argues that

trading can be made in spiritual goods (the Stranger calls this at one point

'merchandise of the soul [ψυχεµπορικησ]' (224 b)): 'Take music in general [µουσικη],184

and graphics [γραφικην]185 and marionette playing [θαυµατοποικην],186 and many other

things, which are purchased in one city, and carried away and sold in another - wares

of the soul which are hawked about' (224 a). The Sophist is a trader of this kind, who

specialises in virtue: 'Then that part of acquisitive art which exchanges [µεταβλητικον],

[…] and sells the knowledge of virtue, you would again term Sophistry?' (224 e).

The Sophist is also someone who makes money out of disputation, in contrast

to the loquacious man who wastes money out of love for conversation (implicit here

again is the liberality which Plato opposes to Sophistry) (225 d-e). The attempt to

ensnare the Sophist identifies him later in the dialogue (as we saw in § 4) with the

amazing imitator in the Republic X (596 c - 598 d), who with a mirror seems to be

able to create anything, even though he has no knowledge of the things he creates

(Sophist 233 b - 234 b). The Sophist can, like the mimètes in the Republic, 'undertake

to produce [ποιησειν] you and me and all creatures' (233 e),

184Fowler translates this, with some justification, with 'liberal arts in general'.

185Trans. modified. Fowler and Cornford translate with 'painting', for which the usual Greek word is

zoographein. There is certainly justification for this, and painting was probably the art designated by

the Stranger here. But the filiation of writing with sophistry, and the detailed examination of the trait,

imprint etc. in the Phaedrus, justifies the retention of the basic Greek sense of the word.

186Thaumaston is the word used in Republic X, 596 c, to describe the poet-imitator, and literally means

'amazing one'; Fowler translates, again acutely, with 'conjurer'.

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And besides that, sea and sky and earth and gods and everything else there is.

What is more, after producing [ποιησασ] them with a turn of the hand [he] sells

them for quite a moderate sum [σµικρου νοµισµατοσ187 αποδιδοται188] […] [A]

man who says he knows everything and could teach it to another for a small

fee [ολιγου] in a short time can hardly be taken in earnest [παιδιαν νοµιστεον]189

[…] And of all the forms of play [παιδιασ], could you think of any more skilful

[τεχνικωτερον] and amusing [χαριστερον] than imitation [µιµητικον]?' (234 a).

We examined earlier the identity of the miming poet of the Republic with the Sophist.

Here, we clearly see how this devalorised mimesis is linked by Plato to the limited

economy of exchange.

Socrates's valuation of the gift is far from unequivocal however. He elsewhere

returns the possibilities of transcendent generosity suggested in his dialogues to the circle of

exchange. The just man used by Glaucon as an example of ideal justice is so designed that he

is never rewarded for his justice, neither by men, nor, as his brother Adeimantus adds, by the

gods (II, 361 b - 366 d). The ideal type of a good man is the type of perfect generosity. When

Adeimantus argues that the gods can be bribed by the unjust man into favouring him, in a

characteristically intricate manner, Plato uses this view, which he considers so blasphemous,

in order to point to the ideal of the gift, and to evoke the possibility of a just and

transcendently generous man who receives no reward for his goodness, even when the gods

187The nomoi, or laws, are the ideal earthly imitation of the divine laws (Laws VII, 817 b). Cf.

Méchoulan, 'Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 147/144.

188The use of apodidotai for selling is another characteristic use of the word for gift in its limited sense

in a dialogue which critiques that sense.

189Lit. 'must be considered as a game or a joke'.

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reward unjust men and not him. But he qualifies this possibility of total generosity by arguing

that the crafts, like the good man described by Glaucon and Adeimantus, only benefit those

for whom they are designed, but are also rewarded by the craft of wage earning (I, 346 a -

347 d). Rulers therefore only benefit others from their rule, and only accept to rule because of

the compensation they receive. On one level, all crafts are transcendently generous,

particularly that of the ruler, who 'doesn't by nature seek his own advantage but that of his

subjects' (347 d).

But this generosity is then compensated by a wage, returning all crafts, including the

ruler's, into the economy of exchange. Within that perimeter, the ruler is distinguished from

other professions because 'good people won't be willing to rule for the sake of either money

or honor. They don't want to be paid wages openly for ruling and get called hired hands' (347

b). It is according to this logic that Socrates argues in Book X that the good man envisioned

by Adeimantus and Glaucon actually is rewarded, thus bringing his transcendent generosity

back into the circle of exchange. And Socrates finds himself compelled to use the language of

reciprocity when in his peroration he attempts to restore the reputation of justice and virtue:

Then there can be no objection, Glaucon, if we return to justice and the rest of virtue

the kind and quantity of wages that they obtain for the soul from human beings and

gods […]?

None whatsoever.

Then will you give me back what you borrowed from me during the

discussion?

What are you referring to in particular?

I granted your request that a just person should seem unjust and a just one

just […]. Well, since they've now been judged, I ask that the reputation justice in fact

has among gods and humans be returned to it […] (X, 612 b-d).
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Socrates then lists the many rewards received by the just (612 e - 613 e): 'Then these are the

prizes, wages, and gifts [αθλα, τε και µισθοι και δωρα] that a just person receives [γιγνεται]

from gods and humans while he is alive and that are added to the good things that justice

itself provides' (613 e).

Without wishing to anticipate our discussion of the aporia of the gift in later writers

(notably Kant and Hegel), it is important to point out here that the gift always composes with

the exchange in their writing. In 'Economimesis' in the case of Kant, in 'From Restricted to

General Economy' in the case of Hegel, and in Given Time, Derrida writes that it is the gift

which makes exchange possible, that it interrupts the circle of exchange as the necessary

condition of exchange.190 This must be pointed out here, because, in a similar way, the

transcendent meaning of dohron is vestigially present in its use by Plato to describe

exchange. Plato, as we have seen, frequently uses dohron to describe an object of exchange

in a sentence which asserts that gods, heroes and good men should give without expecting

anything in exchange, which in other words asserts the necessity of the transcendent meaning

of dohron which we are opposing to its meaning as exchange. The transcendent meaning is

legible, one might say, under the worldly one.

The same double meaning is most interestingly at work in the Euthyphro, in which

Socrates questions Euthyphro on his determination to try his father for the manslaughter of

one of his slaves, whom the father was punishing for the murder of another slave.

Euthyphro's over-literal attitude to the law is early on associated with a certain stinginess. In

his attempt to gently chide Euthyphro out of his obstinacy, Socrates remarks that Euthyphro

190Cf. 'Economimesis'. MIMESIS DES ARTICULATIONS. 55-93/ Trans. Richard Klein. Diacritics 11

(June 1981). 3-25.

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must have an accurate knowledge of things divine if he is going to prosecute his own father

on that basis (4 e), and it is via Socrates's questioning of Euthyphro's knowledge on this

subject that we arrive again at the question of the gift. Euthyphro asserts that 'what is pleasing

[προσφιλησ] to the gods is holy [οσιον], and what is not pleasing is unholy' (7 a). Socrates's

response is somewhat sophistical: he asks 'is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or

do they approve it because it is holy?' (10 a). He answers his own question by arguing that

holiness is the cause of the gods' love for the holy thing (10 a - d): 'it is because it is holy that

it is loved; it is not holy because it is loved' (10 d). But something is pleasing to the gods

because they love it, i.e. by the attitude they adopt toward it (10 e). What is holy is so by

virtue of itself, what is pleasing to the gods is so by virtue of their pleasure (11 a).

Euthyphro's next move is to say that 'the part of justice which is religious and which is holy is

the part that has to do with the service of the gods' (12 e). Socrates then tries to define service

to the gods: care 'is given for the good and welfare of the object that is served [θεραυοµενου]'

(13 b), and therefore 'holiness, since it is the service of the gods [θεραπεια ουσα θεων] must

likewise aim to benefit [ωφελεια] the gods and make them better [βελτιουσ ποιει]? Are you

prepared to say that when you do a holy thing you make some deity better

[βελτιω απεργαζει]?' (13 b) (this condition of service is one of the conditions for the gift act

whose possibility Derrida deconstructs in the introduction to his monograph on the gift,

Given Time).191

191The condition according to which a gift is a gift is that the thing given should benefit the recipient.

Socrates uses a similar argument to demonstrate that justice is not the same thing as paying your debts

in the Republic I. It would be wrong, for example, argues Socrates, to return a madman his weapons if

he were likely to harm himself with them (331 c). Socrates substitutes returning what is appropriate for

returning what is owed as a (provisional) condition of justice: '[Simonides] thought it just to give

[αποδιδοναι (give in return)] each what is appropriate [προσεκον] to him, and this is what he called

giving him what is owed [οφειλοµενον] to him' (332 b).

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The gift as Derrida analyses it underlies every concept of inspiration which we shall

encounter in this thesis.192 Derrida's analysis takes its chance from a remark by Madame de

Maintenon in a letter: '"The King takes all my time; I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I

would like to give all"' (quoted in Given Time 1). Derrida remarks: 'But as the King takes [her

time] all from her, then the rest, by all good logic and good economics, is nothing. She can no

longer take her time. She has none left, and yet she gives it' (2). His deconstructive reading of

Madame de Maintenon's sentence (which, he admits, goes beyond the ordinary understanding

which would attach to her words), finds in it the aporia of deconstruction's concept of time.

And this concept of time which goes beyond good logic is intimately connected to the gift

which goes beyond the circular economy of exchange:

And yet, even though the King takes it all from her, altogether, this time […], she has

left, a remainder that is not nothing because it is beyond everything, a remainder that

is not nothing but that there is since she gives it. And it is even essentially what she

gives, the very thing (3).193

192My analysis of this topos in Derrida was first developed in a paper to the Post-Theory conference at

Glasgow University in July 1996: 'Is the Novel Original? Derrida and (Post-)Modernity.' Post Theory.

Ed. Martin McQuillan et al. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, forthcoming; included in App. III.

193Méchoulan also implicitly relates absence of the gift to a certain notion of time in his discussion of

mimesis. Because mimesis belongs exclusively to the empirical world, he argues, it cannot depart from

the market place and its exchange values. This condemns it to rapidly creating things (the Sophist and

the mirror bearer, he points out, both are characterised by the speed with which they create) whose

existence is ephemeral. Mimesis, in other words, is condemned to existing in the present as instant

('Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 147/144). Méchoulan's argument in the article as a whole centers

on an acceptance of Plato's condemnation of mimesis, which he describes as being without appeal

(146/143), and on a revalorisation of that (Platonic) mimesis. But Méchoulan does not say whether he

revalorises the ephemerality of mimesis in the same way as the other characteristics attributed to it by

Plato (cf. the last footnote of this chapter § 9). He does not at any rate propose an alternative temporal
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Derrida's concept of the gift is itself paradoxical. He begins with the conventional definition

of the gift as the opposite of exchange: a gift is only a gift if you give without receiving

anything in return. But the minute a gift which the recipient wants is intentionally offered or

received - the very conditions of the gift, which distinguish it from theft or accidental loss, or

from giving someone something they don't want for example - the donor becomes

symbolically repaid by gratitude (by what in French would be called reconnaissance,

meaning both recognition of the gift and gratitude for it), and the gift becomes part of an

exchange and therefore ceases to be a gift.194

The gift in Derrida is also an ethical duty. Whereas the economy of exchange

is what constitutes the subject (the subject who gives, the subject who receives), the gift

involves a duty to the other as absolutely other, and a relation to one's self as other, which

deconstitutes the subject. The gift exceeds the way philosophy, within the limit of a certain

concept of time as limit, 'thinks its other'. We were able to characterise the aesthetic above as

an effect on an appreciating subject which is programmed by philosophy. This condition of a

gift which exceeds the subject is therefore also that of understanding art outside of aesthetics.

Derrida deconstructs the unity of the subject as self-identical in the unfolding of time;

regime for mimesis to the one Plato attributes to it, and which might be different from the concept of

time as a succession of instants which exist against the backdrop of (or can be dialectically

reappropriated by, in the case of Hegel) the concept of eternity. If Méchoulan is proposing to revalorise

mimesis as 'stamping around' (piétinement; Ferguson: 'stagnation') (148/145) in the instant, this aspect

of his argument would be questionable. The notion of gift, which Plato points toward in the Phaedrus,

is, I would argue, intrinsically tied to a notion of time which cannot be reduced to the metaphysical one

on which Plato's condemnation and Méchoulan's valorisation of mimesis are based.

194Cf. Heidegger. 'The Thing' (1950) 171-175. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter.

New York: Harper and Row, 1975. 163-186.

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deconstructs the disparate moments of subjectivity as resolved into a unity called the

subject;195 time (as différance) divides the subject. I would like to suggest on the strength of

this, and in a provisional manner, a way in which the gift might be possible. If he who gives

is not a subject, if the giver is not identical with the one who takes pleasure in the gift, if,

divided by time, the giver is not able retrospectively to recognise the one who gave as

himself, then perhaps something may have been given, in accordance with the full rigor of

Derrida's understanding of that term. 196

Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis the concept of Genius in Diderot by contrast faces up to

the difficulty of this aporia. Genius, for Diderot, is a gift from nature, which gives the actor

the ability to take on any personality, and to have no personality of his own. The poetic gift is

a gift of mimesis in its Platonic sense of dissimulation, plasticity, and depropriation. Nature,

which has no personality, no subjectival identity, gives this non-identity to the actor. And so,

argues Lacoue-Labarthe, the poetic gift is a gift of nothing:

Art is this gift. […] Pure gift, where nature delivers herself and offers herself in her

most secret essence and her intimacy, in the very source of her energy, like the

nothing which she is once this energy is exhausted and passed into the given. Pure

195Cf. inter alia 'Limited Inc a b c ...' (1977) 49. Trans. Samuel Weber (1977). Limited Inc. 29-110.

196Stephen Daedalus uses an analogous argument to avoid paying his debts in Ulysses. The difference

between 'I,I' and 'I.I' might work as an emblem for the different concepts of self, time ('When? Now?')

and gift which we are discussing: How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?/

Marry, I wanted it./ […]/ Do you intend to pay it back?/ O, Yes./ When? Now?/ Well … no./ When,

then?/ I paid my way. I paid my way./ Steady on. He's from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner.

You owe it./ Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound./ Buzz.

Buzz./ But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms./ […]/ I,I

and I.I./ A.E.I.O.U' (James Joyce. Ulysses (1922). New York: Random House, 1946. Ch. 6, 187).
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gift, in other words, because it is the gift of the thing or the being, secret and

withdrawn, of the unassignable and unrecognisable as such, to which nothing in this

world [d'ici], not even a gratitude, would be able to respond: because it is nothing,

the thing of no economy, nor of any exchange.197

The ability to avoid exchange comes from giving nothing. But the gift of nature is not a

nothing in the sense that nothing has been given, but that what has been given is not a thing:

nothing.198 It is nothing because it is not a gift of subjectivity or to subjectivity. What is

given must (be what) deconstitute(s) the subject.

That is why the artist, the subject of this gift (which itself is not the gift of any

quality or property), is not really a subject: [a] non-subjected-subject or [a subject]

without subject, it would be just as well to say [a] multiplied, infinitely plural

subject, since the gift of nothing is identically the gift of everything, the gift of

impropriety is the gift of general appropriation [e.g. of the many identities that can be

taken on by the actor] and of presentation (29).199

197'L'art est ce don. […] Pur don, où la nature se livre elle-meme et s'offre dans sa plus secrète essence

et son intimité, dans la source meme de son énergie, comme le rien de ce qu'elle est une fois cette

énergie épuisée et passée dans le donné. Pur don, autrement dit, parce que c'est le don de la chose ou de

l'etre, du secret et du retiré, de l'inassignable et de l'irreconnaissable comme tels, à quoi nulle chose

d'ici, pas meme une gratitude, ne saurait répondre: car ce n'est rien, la chose d'aucune économie ni

d'aucun échange' ('Le paradoxe et la mimésis' (1979) 28-29. L'imitation des Modernes. 15-36).

198This is reflected in the use, in Elizabethan English, of 'nothing' to mean 'vagina'.

199'C'est pourquoi l'artiste, le sujet de ce don (qui n'est lui-meme le don d'aucune qualité ou propriété),

n'est pas vraiment un sujet: sujet-non-sujet ou sans sujet, c'est à dire aussi bien sujet multiplié,

infiniment pluriel, puisque le don de rien est identiquement le don de tout, le don de l'impropriété est le

don de l'appropriation générale et de la présentation.'

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The subject is subject to an economy, in which the different moments which divide it are

unified in one subjectivity. Every gift by that subjectivity becomes part of an exchange

(symbolic or material) which is to that subject's benefit. Therefore, the gift of impropriety

makes possible a transcendently generous gift which exceeds exchange. Derrida also argues

in Given Time that the gift must be completely unpredictable, and cannot form part of any

programme, or else that programme would automatically include repayment of some kind for

the donor (gratitude, the reward of doing one's duty etc.); any programme works in fact to the

benefit of the economy of the subject. At the same time, it must be intentional, or else it

would not be a gift but an accident (cf. Given Time 123). The predictable, the program, is

what allows différance to be interpreted as the unity of the subject. We also characterised

aesthetics as the programme which philosophy draws up for art, in which the value of art is

lost by virtue of the fact that it works according to a programme. The deconstitution of the

subject necessary for the gift and for the understanding of art outside of aesthetics is also that

element which is not thinkable within a program, an economy etc. It is just such an

unprogrammable which will be at stake in our analysis.

Returning to the Euthyphro, the concept of men being able to give anything to the

gods, of any reciprocity between men and gods which would turn the gods' gift into an

exchange, would of course be very unholy, so superior are the gods to men.200 Euthyphro

argues that the service given by gods to men is like that given by slaves to their masters (13

d), but this brings about the question of 'what is that supreme result which the gods produce

when they employ our services?' (13 e), and with it again the absolute difference between

men and gods and the impossibility for men to give them anything. After Euthyphro attempts

to evade the issue comes Socrates's most sustained engagement with the concept of gift.

200Cf. Given Time 137-138 for a discussion of gifts to the gods which involve man in an exchange with

them.
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Socrates. And what is holiness? Don't you think that it is a science of sacrifice and

prayer?

Euthyphro. I do.

Socrates. And, on the other hand, to give aright [διδοναι ορθωσ] will be to

give them in return [αντιδωρεισθαι] those things which they may need to receive

from us? I take it there would be no art in offering anyone a gift

[δωροφορειν διδοντα] of something that he did not need.

Euthyphro. True, Socrates.

Socrates. And therefore, Euthyphro, holiness will be a mutual art of

commerce [εµπορικη παρ αλληλων] between gods and men.

Euthyphro. An art of commerce, if you like to call it so.

Socrates. Well, I do not like it if it is not so. But tell me, what advantage

could come to the gods [ωφελεια τοισ θεοισ τυγχανει] from the gifts [δωρων] which

they receive [λαµβανουσιν] from us? Everybody sees what they give [διδουσι] us.

No good that we possess but is given [δωσιν] by them. What advantage can they gain

by what they get from us [λαµβανουσιν τι ωφελουνται]? Have we so much the better

[πλεονεκτουµεν] of them in this commerce [εµποριαν] that we get all good things

from them, and they get nothing from us?

Euthyphro. What! Socrates. Do you suppose that the gods gain anything

[ωφελεισθαι λαµβανουσιν] by what they get from us?

Socrates. If not, then what would be the meaning, Euthyphro, of these gifts

[δωρα] to the gods from us? (14 d - 15 a).201

201I have insisted on the Greek original in this passage to bring out the way Socrates insists and

incessantly returns to the aporia of the gift.

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Since nothing men can give could be useful to the gods, Euthyphro can only answer

that we can give them holy things, 'worship, honor, and […] good will' (15 a). This of course

returns the argument to where it was before, namely to the assertion that what is holy is what

pleases the gods. Socrates twice describes the argument as circular (11 b-e, 15 b), comparing

the arguments to the statue of Daedalus, which does not stay in its place. This is significant,

because the circle is the shape which pre-eminently symbolises exchange and reciprocity.

The paradox of the gift with which the dialogue ends, is described by the figure of the

exchange which it intersects, makes possible etc. Because the argument ends inconclusively,

the status of the question regarding whether we can give anything to the gods is not decided.

Socrates uses the words dohron and kecharismenon as forming parts of an exchange between

gods and men. But the impossibility of gods giving anything that might be of advantage to

them implies on one level that what the gods give is only given in a transcendent sense which

cannot form part of an exchange. Again, the transcendent sense of dohron and

kecharismenon is implicit in the use Socrates makes of them in their limited senses. Although

not explicitly articulated in Plato's text, the indecision with which the dialogue ends

corresponds to a necessity. Holiness is defined as the necessity of giving to the gods, and this

necessary gift is at the same time necessarily described as impossible. Without wishing to

argue that Plato anticipates Derrida, I would like to suggest that the aporia of the gift is at

work in Plato's text, and is available as a resource for the kind of writing which Derrida's

work has made possible today.

The terms in which Socrates for the last time puts forward the definition of holiness

as what is pleasing to the gods are suggestive: 'the holy is what pleases them [κεχαρισµενον],

not what is useful [ωφελιµον] to them, nor yet what the gods love [φιλον]' (15 b). Because the

world of usefulness and of commerce is intrinsically linked to the circle and exchange, the

contrast between usefulness and what pleases the gods in 15 b carries a certain weight.
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Fowler translates kecharismenon, the word for favor discussed above, as 'grateful',202 and

gratitude, in Given Time, is in the last resort the means by which the giver is repaid by the

recipient of the gift, and the possibility of the gift annulled. The gift is only a gift if the

recipient wants it, if the recipient wants it, he will feel grateful, if he feels grateful, the gift

will cease to be a gift. Fowler's translation is a mixture of blindness and insight: in translating

kecharismenon with a word which names the impossibility of the gift (the gift is only

possible with and annulled by gratitude), he suggests a stronger translation which makes that

impossibility explicit: 'the holy is what is given to them, not …'. The paradox of the gift here

assumes another facet: the only way to give charis to the gods without taking part in an

exchange is for both to give without reciprocity. This demands from the holy man an

imitation of the gods, not in their gifts, but in the absolute generosity of their giving. We are

led to inspiration as imitation, to the gift as imitation, to the problem which is at work in the

Phaedrus, as well as Kant, Nietzsche, and all writers who attempt to grapple with the issues

raised by Plato's writing on the gift and its relation to inspiration.

Having examined the resonance of Lysias' speech in Plato's other dialogues, we will

now look forward, and ground the questions it raises regarding generosity in later

commentary on Plato. Two remarks must be made.

1. The question of disinterestedness constitutes for Heidegger the core of Nietzsche's

misunderstanding of Kant.203 Kant defines Taste as 'the capacity to judge an object or mode

of representation by means of delight or revulsion, devoid of interest', and the object of such

delight as the beautiful (quoted in Nietzsche Ch. 15, 108). Nietzsche interprets Kant's

definition as demanding indifference toward the beautiful. Heidegger corrects Nietzsche by

showing that by 'without interest', Kant means free bestowal of attention to the object for its

202Euthyphro. Bilingual ed. Trans. Harold N. Fowler. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus.

London: Heinemann, 1914.

203Nietzsche I, Ch. 15.

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own sake, and not as a means to fulfil another aim (109). One implication of Kant's remark,

as highlighted by Heidegger, is that the beautiful object cannot form part of an exchange, in

which it is a means to another practical aim. The other, more obvious implication, is that the

disinterestedness which is discussed in Lysias' speech, as well as in the commentary on it

later in the Phaedrus, is an aesthetic category. As we shall examine later in this chapter, the

misunderstanding of Kant on this issue also affects Nietzsche's relationship to the Phaedrus. I

will try to show that the inspired/generous poet-lover described in that dialogue anticipates

Nietzsche's artist, both as portrayed in The Birth of Tragedy, and in The Will to Power.

2. The Phaedrus shares this foregrounding of an aesthetic discussion by an economic one

with Kant's third Critique, as well as with the Republic. As Derrida points out

('Economimesis' 58/3-4), the two remarks in which Kant mentions salary (§§ 43 and 51)

surround the essential part of his discussion of mimesis. In both sections, Kant remarks that

artwork should not be produced in exchange for salary. Kant's remarks concerning art are

therefore analogous to Socrates's regarding love and philosophy, as is the superiority of free

art to mercenary occupations in the third Critique. The Republic also introduces its

description of the ideal city with an account of conventional economics. Book II begins with

a distinction between wages and virtues which anticipates Kant-Heidegger's definition of

disinterestedness:

[Socrates]. Tell me, do you think there is a kind of good [αγαθον] we welcome, not

because we desire what comes from it, but because we welcome it for its own sake -

joy [χαιρειν ('gifts')], for example, and all the harmless pleasures that have no results

beyond the joys [χαιρειν] of having them?

[…]

And is there a kind of good [χαριν] we like for its own sake and also for the sake of

what comes from it - knowing, for example, and seeing and being healthy? We

welcome such things, I suppose, on both counts.

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[…]

And do we also see a third kind of good, such as physical training, medical treatment

when sick, medicine itself, and the other ways of making money [χρηµατισµοσ]?

We'd say that these are onerous but beneficial [ωφελειν] to us, and we wouldn't

choose them for their own sakes, but for the sake of the rewards [µισθων (lit. 'salary')]

and other things [χαριν ('benefits')] that come from them (357 b-c).

The first kind of good is almost identical in its phrasing to Kant's definition of the

beautiful, and opposed, as in Kant (§§ 43 and 51), to the economy of exchange (though using,

as we saw earlier, the word 'gift' to describe a part of that economy). Socrates begins his

description of the ideal city by imagining a city governed by the third (and lower) kind of

good described in 357 b-c. What ensues is a description of conventional market economics.

Socrates starts by demonstrating the need for division of labor (369 c - 370 d), and then lists

the different trades required to satisfy the appetites of the city's citizens (370 d - 371 b),

demonstrates the need for a market (371 c - e), details the other needs of the city beyond

essentials and how these will be satisfied (372 a - 373 c), and describes how this eventually

leads the city to expand and quarrel with its neighbours (373 d - e). Then follows the need for

soldiers, which immediately introduces the means of training the soldiers to defend the city

against its enemies without attacking its inhabitants. The first of these means is storytelling

(377 b - 383 c), and introduces the Republic's first sustained discussion of poetry, considered

there in its pedagogic aspect, and which continues till the end of Book II. Book III, as is well

known, discusses the different kinds of poetry, and excludes imitative poetry considered here

in its first, restrictive sense of impersonation. The conclusion of the discussion of poetry is

then postponed until Book X.204 In Book X, that conclusion, namely poetry's provisional

exclusion from the Kalipolis (606 e - 608 b), is followed by Socrates's renewal of the

discussion regarding the reward of the just man: 'And yet we haven't discussed the greatest
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rewards [επιχειρα] and prizes [αθλα] that have been proposed for virtue' (608 c). This

discussion of course returns to the concession made by Socrates to Adeimantus and Glaucon

at the beginning of Book II, namely that the just man is not rewarded for his goodness. So the

discussion of poetry in the Republic is in fact enclosed within the discussion of wages and

justice, and takes place during the postponement of that discussion.

This structural enclosure of the discussion of poetry within the discussion of wages

in the Republic accompanies a demonstration of poetry's belonging to the lower sphere of

appetites and of exchange. Philosophy, although it remains complicitous with exchange at

certain important moments, exists on a superior level, and is explicitly contrasted with poetry

on this head. The third Critique grants poetry the same position that is granted to philosophy

in the Republic, a movement which I will now show is anticipated by the Phaedrus. We

demonstrated above (§ 4) that sophistry/poetry in the Republic is accompanied by a violation

of boundaries (the imitator violates the professional boundaries of craftsmanship by doing

many jobs; violates the boundary of his self by impersonating different people; the Sophist is

rootless and wanders from city to city; the poet is punished, appropriately therefore, by

exile). This fact must be further grounded in the structural enclosure of the discussion of

poetry by an argument which shows that the desires to which mimetic poetry appeals

eventually lead cities to expand beyond their limits and go to war with each other. Socrates'

famed refusal to leave Athens, and to consider exile a worse fate than death in the Apology,

are related to this line of thought. The Phaedrus however opens with Socrates' being

persuaded to leave the boundaries of the city by a speech, the only such occasion recorded by

Plato.

Phaedrus. You extraordinary man - [θαυµασιε], you strike me as the oddest person

[ατοπωτατοσ - lit. 'out of place']. You really [ατεχνοσ] do seem like a stranger on a

204Cf. above in the Exergue and 'Typographie' 205-06.

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visit [ξεναγουµενω] […] and not a local [επιχωριω]; this comes from your neither

leaving the city [εκ του αστεοσ] to cross the borders [εισ την υπεροριαν αποδηµεισ],

nor, I think going [εξιεναι] outside the wall [εξω τειχουσ] at all.

Socrates. […] but you have found the prescription [φαρµακον] to get me out [εξοδου

… ηυρηκεναι] (230 c-d).

The exile to which poetry is left at the end of the Republic is in a certain sense Odyssean,

because Odysseus is both an exemplary symbol of exile and of poetry, and because he leaves

a well ordered home like the Kalipolis to wander through lands filled with magic, wizardry

and barbarism. The most recent translators of the Phaedrus into English, Nehamas and

Woodruff, remark in their introduction to the dialogue on the analogies between the Odyssey

and the opening of the Phaedrus (ix-xi). And Socrates is lead out by a speech, which he

describes as a pharmakon, the word which he uses to describe the ambivalent essence of

writing in the writing myth.205 The Phaedrus therefore opens with a participation by Socrates

in the conditions which he reserves for the poet in the Republic.

The structural position of the discussion of poetry suggests an element of

ambivalence in the status of the exclusion of poetry from the Kalipolis. The enclosure of the

discussion of poetry, like the discussion itself, is circular: the dialogue begins both

discussions, abandons them momentarily, and then returns to them later. The city walls which

are violated because of the unrestrained appetites of its dwellers have symbolic affinities both

with the activity which makes the satisfaction of these appetites possible (the circle of

exchange), and with their discussion within the dialogue (discussion-abandon-return). In

being exiled from the city, the poet literally breaks out of the circle constituted by the city

walls, and, symbolically, out of the circular lines of argument within which poetry is

complicitous with Sophistry, sensual gratification, and reciprocity. The fact that Socrates is
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lead out of the city by a rhetorical speech which attempts to describe an ideal of

disinterestedness thus links the beginning of the Phaedrus thematically with the end of the

Republic. Lysias's speech must be read in that context.

The first aspect of his speech which draws our attention in that connection is that the

condemnation of the self-interested lover by Lysias is of course itself a ploy to get into bed

with the beloved. Socrates, in the structural sense we are trying to adumbrate, has followed

poetry outside the city walls, and has found it to be similar to the poetry he expelled in the

Republic: rhetorical and deceptive. And its alleged disinterestedness is also insufficient,

because it is a ploy to satisfy an interest. The counterpart to the lover's excess is the non-

lover's self-control, and Lysias opposes the two at length throughout his speech: the non-lover

is rational and able to judge what is best for the beloved, whereas the lover is sick and

irrational (231 c-d, 233 b-c), and the non-lover is constant because he is not dominated by

changing emotion (231 a, 232 e - 233 a). But all the advantages conferred by this are practical

ones, advantages which can be reckoned up: choosing from among those who don't love you

as companions gives you a wider selection of people to choose from (231 d), and you will not

be censured for consorting with someone who doesn't love you (231 e - 232 b). Thus, Lysias

does not oppose interest with disinterestedness, but desire with rational calculation.206 This is

most evident in the two concluding paragraphs of the speech. The first opens abruptly with

the assumption that we should 'grant favours [χαριζεσθαι] to those who need them most', and

a few lines later moves equally abruptly to consider the alternative assumption, that 'one

ought to grant favours […] to those who are most able to make a return

[µαλιστα αποδουναι χαριν δυναµενοισ]' (233 d-e). Lysias pursues the second hypothesis by

claiming that it would involve giving 'not to those merely in love with you, but those who

deserve the thing you have to give; not to those who will take advantage of your youthful

205This much has already been pointed out in 'Plato's Pharmacy'.

206This sort of calculation is of course praised at times in Plato, cf. above n.

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beauty, but those who are the sort to share their own advantages with you when you become

older …' (233 e - 234 a), in other words with a description of the non-lover. Therefore the

non-lover is associated with reciprocity and opposed to an ideal of generosity.207

Socrates's first response to the speech remains on the rhetorical level. He criticises its

composition rather than its content, and is forced by Phaedrus to compose a speech with the

same content as Lysias', but without its compositional defects (234 e - 237 a). Although his

second speech on love, in which he rises to Phaedrus's challenge, is on the face of it only a

paraphrase of Lysias's, Socrates introduces there a crucial new element: he identifies the

lover, as presented by Lysias, with the Sophist-poet expelled from the Kalipolis by the

Republic. Love, he argues, 'is some sort of desire [επιθυµουσι]' (237 d). The word translated

by 'desire' names the sensual desire to which poetry and rhetoric appeal. Socrates argues, as

he does in the Republic, that 'there are two kinds of thing which rule and lead us […], the one

an inborn desire for pleasures [επιθυµια ηδονην], another an acquired judgement [δοξα]

which aims at the best' (238 d-e). Similarly, the Republic opposes the appetites to reason, and

to the knowledge of what is best, particularly as they are described in Socrates'

"psychological" discussion in Books IV and V: the parts of the soul 'are two, and different

207The generosity of giving to those in need is anyway retained within the circle of reciprocity because

it is justified by the gratitude the giver will receive in return for his gifts: 'since they have been released

[απαλλαγεντεσ] from the greatest sufferings, they will be the most [πλειστην - 'fully'] grateful [χαριν] to

their benefactors [αυτοισ]. What is more, when it comes to private expenditure [ιδιασ δαπαναισ], it will

be right for them to invite not their friends, but those who beg for their share and those who need filling

up [πλησµονησ]; for they will treat their benefactors [εκεινοι] fondly, attend on them, call at their

doors, be most delighted [

], feel not the least gratitude [χαριν], pray for many

blessings [αγαθα] for them' (233 d-e). The calculating nature of Lysias' speech is also evident in the

concluding paragraph, which warns the paidikos from granting his favours equally to all non-lovers

(234 b-c).
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from one another. We'll call the part of the soul with which it calculates the rational part, and

the part with which it lusts, hungers, thirsts, and gets excited by other appetites the irrational

appetitive part, companion of certain indulgences and pleasures' (IV, 439 d).

Now, when judgement [δοξησ] leads us [αγουσησ] by means of reason [λογω] toward

the best [αριστον] and is in control [κρατουσησ], that control [κρατει] is called

restraint [σοφροσυνη] . When desire [επιθυµιασ] drags us irrationally

[αλογωσ ελκουσησ] towards pleasures [ηδονασ] and rules in us [αρξασησ], its rule is

called excess [αρχη υβρισ επονοµασθη] (Phaedrus 237 - e - 238 a).

Excess has many forms (polueides), and the appetitive part is also multiform in the Republic:

'we had no one special name for it, since it's multiform' (V, 580 d). This lack of any proper

essence is clearly analogous with the mimetic poet's imitation of all crafts and mastery of

none, as well as of the intrinsic difficulty of defining the Sophist. Appetite in the Republic

also leads to the tyranny which is brought about by love in the first two speeches of the

Phaedrus.208 Those ruled by appetite ('they always look down at the ground like cattle, and,

with their heads bent over the dinner table, they feed, fatten, and fornicate' (586 a)) run the

same risk as the guardians do from the influence of imitative poetry: not only might they be

encouraged to imitate other crafts, but might also 'imitate neighing horses, bellowing bulls'

(III, 396 b).

In Book IX, Socrates fashions an image [εικονα πλασαντεσ]' (588 b), in order to

show that the appetitive part should be subordinated to the rational, in other words

thematically linking the argument to poetic fictionning. And the image he uses for the

multiformed appetite is 'One like those creatures that legends [µυθολογουντα] tell us used to

come into being in ancient times, such as the Chimera, Scylla, Cerberus' (588 c). The
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Chimerae, and other similar creatures, intriguingly resurface in the Phaedrus. When Phaedrus

asks whether Socrates believes in the 'fairy-tale [µυθολογηµα]' (229 c) in which the river god

Boreas seizes the nymph Oreithuia from the river Illissus (cf. 229 b), Socrates answers that

the clever person who tries to find rational explanations for such myths 'after that […] must

set the shape [ειδοσ] of the Centaurs to rights, and again that of the Chimaera, and of a mob

of such things - Gorgons and Pegasuses - and strange hordes of other intractable and

portentous kinds of creatures flock in on him' (299 d-e).209 These parallels demonstrate the

structural similarity between the poet in the Republic and the lover in the first two speeches

of the Phaedrus, and the relationship of the question of appetites to image making and

fictioning. As we saw above, the discussion of rhetoric in the Phaedrus condemns it along the

same lines according to which poetry and Sophistry are condemned in the Republic and in the

dialogues against the Sophists. With this observation, we approach the thorny question of the

unity of the dialogue. It is argued that there is only a narrative principle of unity, not a

philosophical one, between the three speeches on love, and the discussion of rhetoric and

writing which follow them.210 Having showed the condemnation of poetry/appetite/sophistry

which is articulated throughout Plato's work to underlie the first two speeches and the later

discussions of rhetoric and writing, we will turn to the main speech on love which lies

between them, and which presents a different picture of the poet.

The redemption of the mimetès in the lover is clearest in its (an)economic dimension:

the lover embodies the type of generosity which transcends exchange, and which is suggested

in all of Plato's comparisons of conventional economics with philosophy. Thus, 'the greatest

of goods come through madness, provided it is bestowed by divine gift [θεια … διδοµενησ]'

208Cf. Phaedrus 238 b and 250 e.

209Chambry also draws attention to the similarity of the image in Republic IX with the image of the soul

as a chariot in the Phaedrus (VII, 75 n 1).

210For a discussion of this indictment cf. Derrida. 'La pharmacie de Platon' 74-79/66-67.
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(244 a). And this is reflected in the lover who receives the divine gift through the beloved:

'These are the benefits [δωρησεται 'gifts'] which come from the friendship of lover […]

whereas the acquaintance of the non-lover, which is diluted with a merely mortal good sense

dispenses miserly benefits [οικονοµουσα (from oikonomeoh, solecism)] […], engenders in

the soul which is the object of his attachment a meanness [ανελευθεριαν; 'lack of

liberality)']211 which is praised by the majority as a virtue, and so will cause it to wallow

mindlessly around' (266 d - 257 a). It is only in the lover that Socrates articulates the gift

clearly.

6. Pathos

The longer Socrates remains outside the city walls in the Phaedrus, the more he is affected by

inspiration; one of the words in Greek which inspiration translates is ekstasis, standing

outside of oneself. And the longer he shares, by virtue of his ekstasis, the poet's situation, the

more inspiration suggests itself to him as a model for poetry. We are now going to follow

Socrates's progressive inspiration through the five instances in which Socrates claims to be

inspired in the Phaedrus.212 These moments punctuate the dialogue from its beginning until

Socrates's (inspired) recantation. We will focus on the tension between the comic nature of

the exchanges in the context of the narrative, and the vocabulary, drawn mainly from the

tragedians and tragic situations, which Socrates uses to describe his experience. (2).

The first reference in the Phaedrus to inspiration, after he and Phaedrus set forth

together, is an indirect one, and comes after Phaedrus has read Lysias's speech to Socrates.

When Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he liked the speech, Socrates answers:

211Cf. above n.

212For the sake of clarity, these will be numbered in brackets, in the order in which they occur in the

dialogue.
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Superhumanly [∆αιµονιωσ], in fact, my friend; enough to make me beside myself

[εκπλαγηναι]. And it was because of you, Phaedrus, that I felt as I did […] because

you seemed to be positively beaming with delight at the speech as you read it […]

and I joined in the ecstasy [συνηβακχευσα] with your inspired [θειασ] self

(Phaedrus 234 d).

Phaedrus is convinced Socrates is joking (234 d-e), and his suspicion is vindicated on one

level by Socrates's critique of the speech later in the dialogue. Socrates subtly criticises the

speech on one level by pretending to be inspired by it. But the terms sunebacheusa and

ekplagenai should attract our attention. The former refers to Bacchic ecstasy, the female

madness associated with Dionysius, and from which Nietzsche constructs one of the two

main elements of tragedy.213 The latter is derived from ekplèssoh meaning in the first

instance to strike out, to drive out of, or away from. Lydell and Scott cite plenty of examples

of this use of the word by the tragedians.214 The second, related sense is to drive out of one's

213(1). Cf. Socrates's earlier description of himself 'as a man who is sick with passion ['passion' supplied

by translator] for hearing people speak', and of Phaedrus as seeing in such a person 'a companion in his

manic frenzy [συγκορυβαντιον]' (228 b). The frenzy provoked by speeches is here again associated

with the Chorybantian women of the cult of Dionysius. Cf. also Plato's claim in Laws II that the best

legislators are drunk old men who combine the sobriety of age with the inspiration of drunkenness

facilitated by wine (671 b-c). Plotinus speaks of the intoxication [αναβαχευεσθε; 'ivresse'] which the

lover experiences collecting himself in himself and outside of his body [απο των σωµατων]' (On

Beauty 5, 5-10). All my translations from On Beauty are based on Du beau. Ennéades (Trans. Bréhier)

I (1924), Bk. 6 (95-106).

214For sense I cf. 'εκ δ' επληξε µου τον αιδω' Aeschylus (vi-v bc) Prometheus Bound 134 and

'αυτον εξεπληξε τον κοµπασµατων' Euripides (v bc) Ion 635; for II 1. cf. Odyssey XVIII, 231,

Aeschylus The Persians 290, Sophocles (v bc) Oedipus The King 922 (where it is used to mean

'amazed' or 'panic stricken'), The Women of Trachis 386, and Euripides Orestes 549 and The Trojan
 144

senses by sudden shock, to amaze, astound, and this is also much used in tragedy. The term

also refers to a generally sudden overpowering passion, to be struck with desire or with

joy.215 Although Socrates is speaking of inspiration playfully, the terms used to describe it

resonate with suffering and tragic allusion.

(3). After Socrates' criticism of Lysias' speech he is reproached by Phaedrus. In order

to defend his criticisms, Socrates claims that they are the result of inspiration:

My breast is full [στεθοσ πληρεσ] […] and makes me feel I could say things which

are different from what Lysias says, and no worse. I am well aware that none of them

has its source216 in my own mind, because I know my own ignorance; the only

alternative, I think, is that I have been filled [πεπληρωσθαι] up through my ears, like

Women 183; for II.2 cf. cf. Euripides Hippolytus 38, Medea 8, and Sophocles The Women of Trachis

629.

215Cf. Plotinus, who uses derivatives of this word to paraphrase Plato's description of divine love in the

Phaedrus' great speech on love: 'we are astonished [εκπληξιν]' by higher beauty (On Beauty 4, 10-15),

and 'joyous astonishment [εκπληξιν ηδειαν]' must be produced in the spectator by the beautiful (15-20;

cf. also 7, 10-15 and 15-20). Plotinus recognises that the experience of being beside oneself is integral

to the inspiration praised later in the dialogue. At the same time, Plotinus, as we shall argue below,

regards anything which affects the subject from the outside with suspicion, and describes sickness as

harming us by hindering our knowledge of ourself, the self-consciousness by which we know beauty to

be identical with us (On Intellectual Beauty 11, 15-35). Plato also regards inspiration as a sickness,

which the first two speeches call malevolent, the great speech beneficial. Plotinus follows the first two

speeches when he writes that sickness makes us ecstatic/strikes us down [µαλλον εκπληξιν; 'nous frappe

et nous abat']' (11, 25-30).

216'Source' supplied by translator.

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a vessel [δικην217 αγγειου], from someone else's streams [εξ αλλοτριων ναµατων]

(235 c-d).

Socrates describes the experience of inspiration without naming it here: he doesn't know or

understand what he is about to say, nor where it comes from, except that it comes from

outside of him, and uses him as a medium, a vessel. But when pressed by Phaedrus to reveal

what he has '"in [his] breast"' (236 d), Socrates stalls coyly (235 d - 237 b) for a very long

time, during which his claim to be inspired looks more and more bogus because of the frankly

comical exchanges that take place between Phaedrus and he. At the same time, the

vocabulary used is again significant. Socrates describes himself in absolutely passive terms,

as a vessel being filled. And the simplicity of the formula ex allotrion 'from another's', will, as

we shall see later, chime with his discussion of writing, through which one is reminded 'from

outside [εξωθεν] by alien marks [υπ' αλλοτριων τυπων]' (275 a).218 Passivity, as is well

217Dikèn literally means 'truth', and is taken to mean 'in the manner of' by all four translators.

218Allotrion is, significantly, more or less equivalent in meaning to 'other'. In using this word to

describe both writing and inspiration, Plato implicitly looks forward to Derrida's argument that both

writing and inspiration mark the intervention of the other as absolutely other within the economy of the

subject. The use of allotrion to mean 'foreign' or 'alien' derives of course from its main meaning, and is

motivated by the suspicion of the other which characterises the metaphysics of the subject. It is

undeniable that the suspicion of the other is active in Plato's denunciation of writing. Plato's

condemnation of writing as allotrion is therefore analogous to that of writing as pharmakon; the Other

is a pharmakon. Derrida points out that the translation by Robin of pharmakon as 'remède' collaborates

in the metaphysical suspicion of the pharmakon, which is questioned on another level by Plato's text in

which pharmakon's opposite meaning of 'poison' is retained ('La pharmacie de Platon' Ch. 4 ('Le

Pharmakon'), 108-113/95-101). I would like to suggest tentatively that Rowe's translation of

allotrion with 'alien' collaborates with "Platonic" metaphysics in a similar manner to Robin's translation

of pharmakon with 'remède' (Robin translates this sentence, in a similar manner to Rowe, with 'c'est à

de sources étrangeres que je me suis rempli'). I would also like underline the fact that allotrion
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known, is one of the key features criticised in mimesis; mimesis is receptive imitation of

others.219 But the genuine inspiration which Socrates praises in the second speech is also

characterised by passivity in the references which lead up to it. The terms used to allude to it

here both prepare for its praise in the great speech, and point back to the poet-Sophist/sensual

lover with which the dialogue began.

(4.) Socrates finally gives in, and before delivering his speech, which is a recantation

of his previous slander of love, appeals to the Muses in what is a clear parody of inspiration

(237 a). And in the middle of his delivery he stops to ask Phaedrus 'Well then […] do you

think, as I do, that something more than human has happened to me

[θειον παθοσ πεπονθεναι]?' (238 c). Socrates's question raises doubts as to the authenticity of

his claim to be inspired, to the point where one could say with near certainty that he is

frankly admitting to pretend to be inspired. The subsequent exchange reinforces this

impression:

tupohn in Phaedrus 275 a retains the possibility of being translated as 'the marks of the other', a

translation which questions that "Platonic" metaphysics. Plotinus seems to insist on allotrion's

metaphysical sense when he writes that 'the impression of ugliness [αισχρον] […] is repelled by the soul

like a discordant thing [ου συµφονουσα] which is foreign [αλλοτριουµενη] to it' (On Beauty 2, 1-5; my

emphasis), or that ugliness derives from the admixture of inferior sensual elements to the pure and

spiritual, as when a man falls into the mud, in which case ugliness happens to him because of the

addition of a foreign element [αλλοτριου; 'étranger'] (5, 45-50; cf. also 6, 15-20; 7, 5-10; 9, 15-20). He

also writes in On Intellectual Beauty that sickness is foreign to us [αλλοτριον; 'étrangère'] (11, 25-30).

Although Plotinus recognises on one level that the experiences of otherness, which attend the being-

beside-oneself and (as we shall see below) pathos, are central to the divine love praised in the

Phaedrus, his use of allotrion, like Rowe's translation, makes Plato's thought more unambiguously

metaphysical.

219Cf. also 242 b, where Socrates says that Phaedrus was the cause of his speech, and 'Typographie'

205, 217, 245, 256-257.

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Phaedrus. I agree, Socrates, that you've been seized by a fluency greater than normal.

Socrates. Then hear me in silence. For the spot seems really to be a divine

one, so that if perhaps I become possessed by nymphs [νυµφολεπτοσ] as my speech

proceeds, do not be surprised; as it is I'm already close to uttering in dithyrambs (238

c-d).

Both greater fluency and uttering in dythrambs are the ornamental accompaniments of

inspiration, not tokens of its authenticity. But against the narrative comedy of the exchange

we should consider philosophically the vocabulary of Socrates's untranslatable remark 'theon

pathos peponthenai'. Pathos is a noun, and literally means passivity, the fact of having

something done to you. But as soon as we use the word 'fact', we reach a limit in translation,

because it disguises the fact that we are translating a noun with a verb form 'having

something done to you'. Peponthenai is a the aorist of pascho, the verb form of pathos.

Pascho means literally to have something done to you, and peponthenai, 'I was in the process

of [being] pascho.' Hackforth, Rowe, and Nehamas and Wooodruff translate these words,

which are used relentlessly in the Phaedrus, with 'experience', 'happen', '[un]touched' (for

[a]patheis) 'condition' etc. All of these words do not name pathos, or passivity in its pure

form, but the subjective "experience" of pathos (Heidegger's argument in relation to the

words used by Plato and modern metaphysics to name Being, truth etc. is of course

analogous). And these meanings can be conveyed by other words in Greek which do not have

the same tragic and passive connotations: sunbainein for to happen or occur, empeiran for

experience. The use of pathos peponthenai is not just the ancient Greek way of saying

'happen'. What makes the sentence untranslatable though is the use of the verb and the noun

together: how can one describe, in English, the fact of having done to you the fact of having
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something done to you? Although such repetitive constructions are more common in Greek,

this in no way mitigates the abyssality of the passivity involved here.220

Describing inspiration as pathos tallies of course with a conventional understanding

of inspiration: the inspired writer makes no contribution to his writing, he is merely the

conduit for another's words. But Derrida describes the act of writing in general, whether

poetic or not, in similar terms:

The writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system […] his discourse

cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself […] be governed

by the system. And reading [la lecture] must always aim at a certain relationship,

unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not

command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is […] a

signifying structure that critical reading should produce.221

This leads us to an important point, which will be of importance to the whole discussion

beyond our analysis of Plato, but which Plato's use of pathos makes imperative that we

should discuss here. The passivity of the object of inspiration as pathos in Plato, might be

explained by deconstruction as resulting from the fact that what was understood as the

subject is always already an effect of writing, and therefore affected by the Other. To

condense what is perhaps the most familiar of deconstruction's lessons, language, in order to

perform its function, must be understood by the other. For the other to understand it,

220I take this opportunity to thank Professor Henry Blumenthal of the Classics Department, University

of Liverpool, and David Bates and Panagiota Vassilopoulou of the Philosophy Department, University

of Liverpool, for their help with ancient Greek, and for verifying, and often reining in, my more

outlandish philological surmises.

221Derrida, De la grammatologie Pt. II, Ch. 2, 227/158; trans. modified.

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language must repeat a code shared by the two users. Therefore, the language we use is never

our own: we are always using a repeatable code which we share with others. And even when

we speak to ourselves, think privately etc., we always do so with a language which we share

with others. This does not, as the knee-jerk reaction to such statements usually assumes,

mean that there is no such thing as "interiority" "personality" etc. Only that the conditions

according to which "interiority" "personality" etc. are possible is a certain impersonality and

repeatability. Deconstruction aims in part to show how accounts of language, from Plato to

Austin, seek to exclude that feature of language which is impersonal, repeatable, anonymous,

but without which language could not function. That part of language is a kind of death, in

which the intentions, the spirit, the "personality" of the speaker inhabit (and are inhabited by)

an a-personal and lifeless code. The opposition to writing (in a generalised deconstructive

sense which makes it analogous to inspiration) is thus an attempt to think of death as

absolutely external to life, whereas in fact the "subject" is always affected from the inside by

its own death (writing).

And this statement is not limited to writing in its restricted sense of course:

everything which we call activity must be pathos, as the condition of its possibility:

When I take responsibility in my name for me, and since I am not identical with

myself […], then taking a responsibility for myself means that I act under the law of

someone else in me [my emphasis].222 […] So the strange thing is that we have to

respond in the sense of having responsibility for another, which means also that we

are not active in doing so, we are passive. […] We take responsibility in a situation

of heteronomy [my emphasis]; that is, in obeying actively-passively, in what I would

222Cf. Beyond Good and Evil Pt. I, § 19.

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call a passion,223 the law of the other […] I would claim that there is no such thing as

an active personal decision, and that the enigma of responsibility lies in this aporia:

that a decision is something passive in a certain sense of passivity, something to

which you are applied.224

So it is not just all writing, but everything "we do" which is conditioned by a law which also

governs inspiration as pathos, understood in its conventional sense. The description of the

passivity which is the condition of responsibility could be a description of inspiration. 225 It

also suggests a different way of thinking passion. The word is habitually (like literature)

understood in its relation to subjective emotion. The passion referred to here however, is in a

way the denial of everything we understand by emotion, since it always comes from the

outside. 226 In the following paragraph Derrida writes: 'I have to obey a spectre and the

223'Passion' is one possible translation of pathos, and is employed by Bréhier to translate Plotinus's use

of the word in On Love (passim in Pt. 1).

224Derrida. '"As if I were Dead": An Interview with Jacques Derrida' 222-223. Applying: To Derrida.

Eds. John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. London: Macmillan, 1996. 212-226.

225'It [the poem] thus takes place, essentially, without one's having to do it or make it; it lets itself be

done, without activity, without work, in the most sober pathos, a stranger to all production, especially to

creation' (Derrida. 'Che cos'è la poesia?' (1988) 233. Bilingual ed. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. A Derrida

Reader: Between the Blinds. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. 221-237).

226Timothy Clark arrives at a similar theory of inspiration, after a critique of circular theories of

inspiration which are based on a paradigm of individual creativity (inspiration is a manifestation of

enhanced individual creativity, enhanced individual creativity is a symptom of inspiration):

'Orientations towards a Theory of Inspiration (with Shelley as a Closing Example)' 85-90. The Critical

Review (New South Wales) 34 (1994). 85-112. The latter theory depends on a notion of creation as

self-ex-pression (99). Clark qualifies these theories, whose circularity one suspects derives from their

consideration of the individual in isolation, with an account of the extra-personal conditions of creation

(formal, semiotic and material) (90). Taking these dimensions into account enables Clark to suggest that
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decision takes place when I am under the law or before the law of the other, intensely active

and passive' ('"As if I were Dead"' 223). The spectre is what sometimes translates Plato's

eidolon. As we shall see later, Plato discusses graphic writing in the Phaedrus as the

eidolon of writing in the soul. In other words, Plato there opposes writing, understood as

death, impersonality etc., in the name of life and interiority. This is curious, because Plato

praises, in the great speech on love, the inspiration which is characterised by the very things

which he condemns in writing. The analogies between writing and inspiration are made clear

more than once in the dialogue, but do not prevent the two from each being granted an

entirely different value. Inspiration, we shall see, is a valorised passivity and heteronomy,

written marks a devalorised; the beloved source of inspiration is a valorised image, substitute

and reminder, writing a devalorised.

Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus has been criticised for neglecting inspiration. 227

What I shall attempt to show in this chapter is that inspiration in the Phaedrus resembles in

what a great number of writers discuss as inspiration can be explained as a process of self-reading. The

writer in the act of writing is always 'second to the sources of his text', and relates to his writing as to the

writing of another (92). The unavoidable consequence of this is a crisis of subjectivity, in which the

subject is divided by the act of writing. This secondarity, as Clark points out, is an effect of the

iterability which, as we suggested in the Introduction, is the condition of writing - 'even when it is a

matter of composition "in the head"' (92). Clark offers as a model of composition the 'improvised

performance, mediated by self-reading' (95), in which the writer submits to the constraints of the

conventions which govern the performance of writing, in order to open himself to the unforseeable

which improvisation with these conventions makes possible. One could also argue that it is just his

division as a subject which makes it possible to submit to convention in an original manner. Clark

writes, furthermore, that inspiration implies a 'psychic crisis and transformation' (99), in which the

writer allows himself to be guided by the response of the reader to his writing before he writes (in the

terms of this thesis, by the advent of the reader as figure for the other).

227These reproaches are mentioned by Melberg in 'Plato's "Mimesis"' 33.

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certain ways Derrida's own concept of writing, and the very concept of writing which 'Plato's

Pharmacy' so accurately shows Plato attempting to reject. It is in the interplay between

writing and inspiration in the Phaedrus that Plato's most interesting contribution to the

discussion of artistic creativity will be found. Before moving on, we should also note that

pathos is, for Aristotle, the third part of the tragic plot, a part which he discusses very

cursorily, by comparison with peripateia and anagnoresis: 'A third part is suffering

[παθοσ]; 228 which we may define as an action of a destructive or painful nature, such as

murders on the stage, tortures, woundings, and the like. The other two have already been

explained'229 (Poetics XI, 1425b10, 2324). Inspiration, as pathos is thus potentially also a

tragic experience, a form of suffering. The account of inspiration and writing in the

Phaedrus present them both as characterised to a certain extent by pathos understood in this

Aristotelian sense.

(5). After Socrates' first speech, Phaedrus accuses him of breaking off in the middle.

Socrates answers: 'Haven't you noticed, my dear fellow, that I'm already uttering epic verses,

and not dythrambs now, even though I'm playing the critic? What do you think I'll do if I

begin praising the other man? Do you know that I'll patently be inspired [ενθουσιασω trans.

modified] by the Nymphs to whom you deliberately exposed me?' (241 e). This is soon

followed by a very different claim by Socrates to be inspired:

When I was about to cross the river […] I had that supernatural experience

[δαιµονιον], the sign [σηµειον] that I am accustomed to having - on each occasion

[…] it holds me back from whatever I am about to do - and I seem to hear a voice

228Fyfe translates with 'calamity'.

229The discussion of reversal takes up all but three sentences of XI, and discovery is later discussed at

length in XVI.
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from the very spot, which forbids me to leave until I have made expiation, because I

have committed an offence against what belongs to the gods (242 b-c).

His being directed by a voice presents him in a similarly passive position to 235 c-d. By

crossing the river, Socrates is traversing another boundary away from the city, and by

analogy is crossing the boundary of his own person. In making his speech, he has slandered

the god of love. And it is in making his retraction that Socrates advances both his concept of

inspiration and of love, both of which are intimately connected. As we shall see, love is a

kind of inspiration. Socrates's moments of inspiration are presented as increasingly authentic,

until he claims to be inspired to recant his condemnation of love as appetite, and replaces it

with a concept of love as inspiration.

For all its apparently episodic structure, the line of development from the beginning

of the dialogue to Socrates's recantation is clear. The first two speeches present the lover as

analogous to the mimetic poet expelled from the Republic. The dialogue also shows Socrates

putting himself in an analogous situation to the poet, by leaving the city, drawn on and

inspired by a speech, and in becoming increasingly affected by an inspiration which is

described in terms of itself being affected from the outside, i.e. in terms which continue the

analogy between the experience of inspiration, and the act of crossing the boundaries of

person and state (which Socrates repeatedly uses as metaphors for one another). We thus

move progressively from the poet (lover) as Sophist to the poet (lover) as inspired. In light of

this, we may see Socrates's recantation of his indictment of love as a recantation of his

expulsion of the poet. Socrates has followed the poet (he describes himself as following after

a speech: 'Just like people who lead hungry animals on by shaking a branch or some

vegetable in front of them, so you seem capable of leading me round all Attica and wherever

else you please by proffering me speeches in books' (230 d)) outside of the city, and

rehabilitated him there. Or rather, the inspiration which affects from the outside, the madness
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which makes people other than what they are, and stand outside of themselves, is in the

Phaedrus shown to be constitutive of the knowledge of the truth on which the polis is

founded in the Republic. The recantation is thus in a sense Plato's own (partial) response to

the challenge he makes to the defenders of poetry at the end of the Republic: 'Then we'll

allow its defenders, who aren't poets themselves but lovers of poetry, to speak in prose on its

behalf and to show that it not only gives pleasure but is beneficial both to constitutions and to

human life. Indeed, we'll listen to them graciously, for we'd certainly profit if poetry were to

be shown to be not only pleasant but also beneficial' (X, 607 a - d).

The relationship between mimesis and inspiration is a complicated one. Both, as we

have said, involve imitation (mimesis as mimicry, inspiration as following the source of one's

inspiration), passivity, and a kind of ex-plosion of the self. 230 But one is a valorised version

of the other. Without wanting to push the anachronism, a movement not unlike Heidegger's

Auseinandersetzung with Plato in Nietzsche is at work here, between the Socrates who expels

and the Socrates who recants. We might call the inspired poet the truth of the mimetic poet.

This is explained succinctly by Lacoue-Labarthe in relation to Heidegger: 'Such is the logic

of the "retreat": it retraces the very thing from which it removes itself. A gulf could separate

the thinking of the recommencement [effectuated by Heidegger] from the workings of the

Amt Rosenberg; it does not prevent the former from insisting on declaring itself the truth of

230Lacoue-Labarthe discusses Diderot's actor's paradox along similar lines, as a valorisation of the

plasticity of personality indicted by Plato in the mimetes, and draws parallels between this and Diderot's

(at first blush contradictory) claim that artistic creation is a form of (inspired) genius, in 'Le paradoxe et

la mimésis' 21 and 28-30Cf. Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis (Pt. IV, Ch. 14, 182-183). For a discussion of

the close relationship which obtained between mimetic and inspirational concepts of the art and

literature of fourteenth century Italy, cf. Martin Kemp. 'From “Mimesis” to “Fantasia”: The

Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts.' Viator 8 (1977). 347-

398.
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the latter' (Musica Ficta Ch. 3, 171/89). In a note to this sentence Lacoue-Labarthe adds:

'"Truth of" is, however, not "identity with," even if it could be, up to a certain point,

"solidarity (even complicity) with." Declaring Heidegger, in his thinking, uniformly

Nazi obscures everything' (172 n 9/155 n 9). Plato's divine lover is the truth of his sensual

lover and poet.

We find this confirmed in a blunt way by the hierarchy of jobs Socrates describes in

the Phaedrus. In the scheme of things outlined in Republic, the poet is inferior to the

craftsman because his productions stand at the furthest remove from truth, and (along with

the Sophist) he seems to be the lowest element of mankind (cf. Republic X, 597 d-e). In the

Phaedrus the poet is ranked above the craftsman or farmer, who is ranked above the Sophist

or demagogue, who is ranked above the tyrant (248 e). The place of the poet/Sophist of the

Republic has not changed, rather, the poet discussed in the Phaedrus is a different kind of

poet. But the Phaedrus still ranks him only sixth out of nine, not only below the lover of

beauty and wisdom and the wise ruler, but even the business man and city administrator, the

athlete and the seer (248 d). This is the result of the fact that the poet's inspiration is different

from the lover's. After discussing the inspiration affecting the prophets and the seers, he

describes the particular inspiration granted to the poet:

A third kind of possession and madness comes from the Muses: taking a tender,

virgin soul, and arousing it to a Bacchic frenzy [eκβαχευουσα] of expression in lyric

and other forms of poetry it educates succeeding generations by glorifying myriad

deeds of those of the past; while the man who arrives at the doors of poetry without

madness from the Muses, persuaded that expertise [τεχνησ] will make him a good

poet, both he and his poetry, the poetry of the sane, are eclipsed by that of the mad,

imperfect and unfulfilled (245 a).

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This communicates with a gesture found throughout Plato's text, which consists in valorising

the poet as a teacher of morality. 231 This position is naturally inferior to the dialectician's

ability to understand the truth, and the lover's to experience it. But this is a curious,

ambivalent gesture, because the lover in the Phaedrus relates to his beloved as to a work of

art. The whole thrust of the dialogue is, as we have shown, toward a rehabilitation of poetry,

but the suspicion of poetry remains. The secondary position of poetry alluded to in 245 a is a

compromise between the two, which need not preclude looking more closely at the potential

role for the arts which lies within the lover as described in the Phaedrus.

To do this we will take a brief detour via the Symposium, Plato's other great dialogue

on love, which consists in the main of a series of speeches on love instigated by Phaedrus,

and whose structure and culminating pronouncement on love are very similar to those of the

Phaedrus. Several comments made in the speeches which precede Socrates's anticipate

Diotima's discussion of love: Phaedrus himself argues that the lover, by virtue of love's

inspiration, is always closer to the gods (Symposium 180 a-b), Pausanias argues that the lover

is more likely to be forgiven by the gods (183 b), and Eryximachus argues that the

communion between god and man is regulated by love (188 c). The "Russian doll" structure

of these arguments (and the narrative of the dialogue) move consecutively from a sensual to a

divine understanding of love. 232 This is structurally similar to the movement in the

Phaedrus from sensual to divine love, from the poet-Sophist to the inspired poet. Diotima

first argues that we can only desire what we lack (because if we had it, we would not desire

it) (200 b). If Love, the demigod, loves wisdom and goodness, he must lack it.

231Cf. Republic II 376 d, 377 b sq., III 398 d sq., 400 e, 401 d-e, IX 591 d, X 607 a, Gorgias, 504 d,

506 c, Meno 99 d, and Laws II 656 a sq., 659 a - 660 e, 661 c, 662 b, 664 a sq., 665 a-c, 668 b, VII 801

c-d, VIII 829 c-d.

232On the issue of temporalisation as a key element in mimesis, and on the intricate temporal structure

of the Symposium's narrative, cf. Melberg, 'Plato's "Mimesis"' 25-32.

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[Diotima]. Then, if [Love] has no part in goodness or beauty, how can he be a god?

[…]

[Socrates]. Yes, but what can he be then? I asked her, A mortal?

[…]

[D.] What I told you before - halfway between mortal and immortal

(Symposium 202 d).

Eros is thus halfway between the gods and men, just as (we shall find in the Phaedrus)

inspiration is a means of connecting man to the divinity. And Diotima repeatedly stresses the

earthly element in Love: 'He is neither mortal nor immortal, for in the space of a day he will

be now, when all goes well with him, alive and blooming, and now dying to be born again by

virtue of his father's nature, while what he gains will always ebb away as fast. So love is

never in or out of need, and stands, moreover, midway between ignorance and wisdom' (203

e).

Standing 'midway between ignorance and wisdom' is the position associated with

opinion, appearance and belief, and which Plato disparages as we have seen above. And this

constant death and rebirth, the constant flux between desire and satiety, absence and

gratification, is the basis for Socrates's critique of sensual gratification. 233 Diotima describes

love as a sensual experience. We find this confirmed by her vocabulary. She develops the

concept that love must necessarily desire what it doesn't have: 'And therefore, whoever feels a

want [επιθυµων] is wanting [επιθυµει] something which is not yet at hand, and the object of

his love and of his desire [επιθυµεια] is whatever he isn't …' (200 e). 234 Epithumeia is not

233Cf. Philebus 42 d and 54 a sq., and Gorgias 493 a sq. and 497 a.

234Epithumeia is the word we saw used in the Phaedrus and the Republic to describe the sensual love

which is contrasted to divine love.

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strictly separated from imeros, but rather serves it. We thus see that the love brought about by

divine inspiration is intimately connected to those senses which Plato elsewhere disparages,

showing that the inspired poet might appeal to feelings without participating in mere sensual

gratification. In the context of our argument, this means that divine love is the rehabilitation

of sensual love, it orients sensual love toward the supersensual, makes it in fact follow the

path of the series of speeches in the Symposium and the Phaedrus.

This, as Lacoue-Labarthe points out, is a defining feature of the aesthetic, as

described by Heidegger: 'the work of art defined as the sensual presentation of a spiritual

content' (Musica Ficta 179-180/94). And, not surprisingly, the Symposium offers works of art

as the crowning example of the work of love. Diotima argues that all partake of the eternal by

procreation: 235 'those whose procreancy is of the body turn to woman as the object of their

love, and raise a family […]. But those whose procreancy is of the spirit rather than of the

flesh […] conceive and bear the things of the spirit. And what are they? you ask. Wisdom and

all her sister virtues; it is the office of every poet to beget them, and of every artist whom we

may call creative' (208 e - 209 a). 236 The greatest and most spiritual works of love are granted

235This point is also made in the Laws IV 721 b-c, when the Athenian demonstrates how the brief

factual statement of the law regarding marriage can be expanded poetically with exemplification, in

order to make it more convincing.

236Heidegger translates Socrates's description of poetry in the Symposium (hè gar toi ek tou mè ontos

eis to on ionti hostooun aitia pasa esti poesis; 'calling something into existence that was not there

before, so that every kind of artistic creation is poetry, and every artist is a poet') with 'Every occasion

[Lacoue-Labarthe: 'laisser-advenir' (allowing the advent of)] for whatever passes over and goes forward

[über - und vorgeht] into presencing from that which is not presencing is poïèsis, is bringing-forth [Her-

vor-bringen; Lacoue-Labarthe: 'pro-duction']' (Symposium 205 b; from Lovitt's translation of

Heidegger's translation in 'The Question Concerning Technology ' 10; modified in the light of Lacoue-

Labarthe's translation and commentary in 'Typographie' 193).

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here to the poet and the creative artist, from whom they were excluded on one level in the

Phaedrus. But for all its lack of explicit acknowledgement that poetry might be a form of

divine love, the Phaedrus does explore the possibilities of such a claim in more detail than in

the Symposium.

This is the opening of Socrates's recantation (modelled on that of Stesichorus who

wrote that the story he wrote about Helen of Troy was not true), in which Socrates begins the

discussion of love which we shall now examine:

'The story is not true', if it says that when a lover is there for the having one should

rather grant favours to the man who is not in love with you, on the grounds that the

one is mad, while the other is sane. That would be rightly said if it were a simple

truth that madness is an evil; but as it is the greatest goods come to us through

madness, provided that it is bestowed by divine gift [θεια διδοµενησ] (Phaedrus 244

a).

The love revalorised by Socrates, and inspiration, are both a form of divine madness.

Socrates accounts for the possibility of inspiration by arguing that the immortal soul

constantly takes part in a journey. During part of this journey the soul is attached to a body;

after death it attaches to another one, and continues to do so for ten thousand years (249 a-b).

Subject to its having been sufficiently virtuous, it is allowed to journey to the heavens.

Socrates then compares the soul to a charioteer driving two horses, one good horse

symbolising the desire for the super-sensual truth, one bad symbolising sensual appetite (246

d-e). Hindered by the bad horse and helped by the good, the best souls are allowed to behold

the heavens (247 b-d). But inspiration comes into play when the soul's contemplation of the

heavens is over and it is forced to inhabit a body again.

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Well then, the result of the fourth kind of madness [the inspiration apportioned to

lovers] is clear - the madness of a man who, seeing beauty here on earth, and being

reminded [αναµιµνησκοµενοσ] of true beauty, becomes winged, and fluttering with

eagerness to fly upwards […] and taking no heed of the things below, causes him to

be regarded as mad: my conclusion is that this then reveals itself as the best of all the

kinds of divine inspiration [ενθουσιασεων; trans. modified] and from the best of

sources for the man who is subject to it and shares in it, and that it is when he

partakes of this madness that the man who loves the beautiful is called a lover (249 d-

e). 237

This extract contains a preview of all the characteristics of inspiration developed in the

Phaedrus. Inspiration takes place in the actual sensible world, when the soul is no longer in

the heavens, and when the beauty of a man in the sensible word reminds the lover who

beholds him of the supersensual world; the sight of the beloved makes the wings which the

soul used to approach the heavens and which it lost on its return to earth grow again.

Inspiration is thus characterised by both memory and absence, as memory in absence. Love

and inspiration are thus a means of connection between the sensual and the supersensual

worlds, with the consequence that the love discussed by Plato here differs from the desires

associated with Sophistic imitation in being a combination of sensual and supersensual urges.

7. Memory and Absence

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

237For a medical account of the role of mania in poetic creation cf. Kay Redfield Jamison. Touched

with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. New York: Free P, 1994.
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Dull roots with spring rain. 238

The fact that love takes place when the object of love is absent is consonant with the

description of love in the Symposium, where you can only love something you lack. Love

only takes place in the absence of the supersensual. In the Philebus Socrates argues that

longing for absent things is only possible because of memory. Memory in the Phaedrus and

in the Philebus, notwithstanding the habitual opposition of these two as middle and late

dialogues, works according to analogous principles. 239 It defines memory as the principle

according to which love and inspiration, as the articulation of the sensible to the spiritual, are

possible. Socrates defines memory in the following terms:

Socrates. When that which has been experienced by the soul in common with the

body is recaptured, by and in the soul itself apart from the body, then we speak of

'recollecting' [αναµιµνησκεσθαι] something. Is that not so?

238T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land (1922). I. 'The Burial of the Dead' 1-4. Selected Poems. Second ed.

London: Faber, 1961. 49-74.

239Nehamas and Woodruff, in their introduction to their translation of the Phaedrus, argue that the

'recollection theory' is restricted to Plato's middle dialogues. These dialogues include the Meno and the

Phaedo (although one might note in passing that Socrates does not endorse the recollection theory

unequivocally in the latter dialogue), and the last 'middle dialogue' according to them to resort to the

recollection theory is the Phaedrus. After that, 'Plato simply never appeals to it again' (xliv). The views

of the later dialogues are, for Nehamas and Woodruff, exemplified by the Philebus, which implies that

they hold the concept of memory in that dialogue to be completely different from the one in the

Phaedrus. There is something suspiciously circular about this argument (the Phaedrus and the others

are middle dialogues because they subscribe to theories such as the recollection theory, these theories

are restricted to the middle dialogues because they do not appear in later dialogues, which are defined

by … the fact that they do not resort to these theories …), which is particularly unfortunate given that it

concerns the faculty which is supposed to organise the sequence of events in time.
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Protarchus. Undoubtedly.

Socrates. And further, when the soul that has lost the memory of a sensation

or what it had learned resumes that memory within itself and goes over the old

ground, we regularly speak of these processes as 'recollections' [αναµνησεισ]

(Philebus 34 b-c).

Socrates prefaces his discussion of memory with 'an understanding of the nature of desire

[επιθυµιαν]' (34 d). When a body desires a drink, it must be experiencing thirst: 'apparently

he desires [επιθυµει] the opposite of what he is experiencing [πασχει]; being emptied, he

longs to be filled' (35 a). How is it then that the thirsty man can desire what he doesn't

experience? 'it cannot be the body, for that of course is being emptied. […] Hence the only

alternative is that the soul apprehends the replenishment, and does so obviously through

memory [µνηµη]' (35 b). At the same time that memory makes possible the desire for absent

things, it makes possible desires which exist independently of experience and the body. It is

thus not a coincidence that memory is also central to the experience of the divine desires

discussed in the previous section. We can also see here just how close Plato's concept of

memory is to the modern concept of the imagination.

The role of memory in the process of inspiration is stressed throughout the section of

the Phaedrus we are examining. Memory and absence characterise, as we saw, the

relationship of the lover to the divine, and then in turn his relationship to his beloved: 'when

[the soul] is apart [from its beloved] and becomes parched, […] so that the entire soul, stung

all over, goes mad with pain; but then, remembering [µνηµην] the boy with his beauty, it

rejoices again' (Phaedrus 251 d-e). Just as the sight of the boy acts as a substitute for the

heavens of which it reminds the lover, so too the memory of the beloved replaces him in his

absence. Plato demonstrates that imeros is conditioned not just by memory, but by the

memory of a memory, and hence the possibility of endless substitutions of memory for
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experience en abyme (the Symposium is, of course, also structured en abyme). It is also

memory which prevents imeros from being substituted by sensual love in Socrates's horse

analogy, when the bad horse has forced the charioteer to give in to his desires: 'Now they

come close to the beloved and see the flashing of his face. As the charioteer sees it, his

memory [µνηµη] is carried back to the nature of beauty, and again sees it standing together

with self-control on a holy pedestal; at the sight he becomes frightened, and in sudden

reverence falls on his back, and is forced at the same time to pull back on the reins so

violently as to bring both horses down on their haunches' (254 b-c). Memory is the general

principle of a sensual desire independent of the body; it both supplements the absence of the

object of desire, and prevents bodily gratification and the breach of this absence.

Memory responds to the same requirement as aesthetics: in the absence of the

supersensual, we need a sensual presentation or reminder of it, an image. The Phaedo argues

that we possess knowledge of the ideal forms of which the objects of the sensual world are

copies. Accordingly, the process by which man learns of the intelligible world by observing

the supersensual is characterised as a process of remembrance: 'And if it is true that we

acquired our knowledge before our birth and lost it at the moment of birth, but afterward, by

the exercise of our senses upon sensible objects, recover the knowledge we had once before, I

suppose that what we call learning will be the recovery of our own knowledge, and surely we

should be right in calling this recollection' (Phaedo 75 e). 240 Thus inspiration participates in a

240Socrates describes the experience of someone thinking to himself in these terms:

Socrates. It seems to me that at such times our soul is like a book.

Protarchus. How so?

Socrates. It appears to me that the conjunction of memory with sensations,

together with the feelings consequent upon memory and sensation, may be said as it

were to write words in our souls. And when this experience writes what is true, the
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divine mimesis; the love it makes possible is the love for an earthly likeness of intelligible

virtue. And that is precisely the function carried out by the beloved:

Few souls are left who have sufficient memory [µνηµησ]; and these, when they see

some likeness [οµοιωµα] of the things there, are driven out of their wits

[εκπληττονται] 241 […]. Now in the earthly likeness [οµοιωµασιν] of justice and self

control and the other things which are of value to souls, there is no illumination

[φεγγοσ], but through dull organs just a few approach their images [εικονασ] and with

difficulty [µογισ] observe the nature of what is imaged [εικασθεντοσ] in them; but

before it was possible to see beauty blazing out [λαµπρον] […] (250 a-b).

The beloved is an image, and a reminder of the absent supersensual. It is thus essentially a

mimesis: it imitates, and stands in the place of Being. The devalorised mimesis of the poet-

Sophist reappears with its essential features intact, but valorised here because it is oriented

toward the supersensual. The general presentation of the beloved as eikon also makes it

possible to treat him as if he were a statue: 'the man who […] on seeing a godlike face, or

some form of body which imitates [µεµιµηµενον] beauty well […] would sacrifice to his

beloved [παιδικιοσ] as if to a statue [αγαλµατι] of a god' (251 a-b). The use of agalma here is

interesting, because it is the same word used to describe the statues of Daedalus in the

result is that true opinion and true assertion springs up in us, and when the internal

scribe that I have suggested writes what is false we get the opposite sort of opinions

and assertions (Philebus 38 e - 39 a).

The words memory writes in our souls as in a book are the copies of the opinions and assertions we

make. Here, as in the Phaedrus and the Phaedo, it is memory which establishes the link between the

copy and its original. This passage is discussed in 'La double séance' 209-220/184-194.

241Similar to ekplagenai (cf. above n).

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Meno which symbolised the slipperiness of opinion. The revalorisation of love is

accompanied by a revalorisation of mimesis. Instead of imitating objects in the sensible

world, mimesis here designates the imitation by the beloved of the supersensual.

But this does not mean that divine love is merely ideal, or "Platonic" in this account.

Souls when they are attached to bodies must experience the divine sphere through the earthly

senses:

Let this be our concession to memory [µνηµη], which has made me speak now at

some length out of longing for what was before; but on the subject of beauty - as we

said, it shone out [ελαµπευ] in company with those other things, and now that we

have come to earth we have found it gleaming [στιλβον] most clearly through the

clearest [εναργεστατα] 242 of senses [αισθεησεωσ]. For of all the sensations

[αισθησεων] coming to us through the body [δια του σωµατοσ], sight is the keenest:

wisdom we do not see […] (Phaedrus 250 c-d).

An accurate understanding of Plato's argument necessitates a careful assessment of the

symbolic status of the beloved. This assessment is a large theme in the discussion of how

allegorical writing should be approached, and of the extent to which the concrete particularity

of the symbol is effaced before what it symbolises. In this case, does the physical beauty of

the boy, apprehended through the senses, become irrelevant once it is identified as a reminder

of the divine? I would argue that Plato's argument demands that the particularities of the

symbol, the boy's beauty as perceived through the senses, should not be set aside so easily.

Beauty is stilbon, which in Greek designates the reflection of light on polished surfaces, the

glitter or the gleam. In other words, the light of the supersensual is mediated through the

242Plotinus writes that the soul's beauty shows itself more clearly [εναργεστατοσ] in a serious soul (On

Intellectual Beauty 3, 1-5).

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material of the surface. And it gleams, explicitly, through the clearest of sensations coming to

us through the body. Although the divine may gleam through, the senses through which it

gleams are not effaced; divine beauty is always mediated through the senses. Plato is careful

therefore not to allow any sublimation of the beloved eikon, it partakes of both the sensual

and supersensual.

Plato might be usefully contrasted with Plotinus on this point. Plotinus writes that the

soul is pleased by (and finds the beautiful in) beings like herself, or in traces [ιχνοσ] of those

beings (On Beauty 2, 5-10). These beings are the intelligible, and when she sees them, she

remembers [αναµιµνησκεται] herself (2, 10). Thus far (as Bréhier points out at 97 n 1),

Plotinus presents a divine memory similar to that in the Phaedrus. 243 Plotinus's more

sustained discussion of memory explicitly disagrees with Plato on this subject however. This

becomes apparent early on when Plotinus writes that the memory which he is examining, is

different from the recollection of the forms which we knew before birth discussed by

Plato. 244 Plotinus ends this passage with the abrupt and perhaps severe comment that the

concept of memory he is excluding from his discussion (i.e. Plato's) has nothing to do with

time (25, 35).

We saw in the Philebus that memory for Plato is an intermediary faculty between

sensation and recollection. Plotinus, by contrast, seems to give sensation the role played by

memory in the Philebus, arguing that the soul when it experiences sensations [αισθενεσθαι]

uses the body as a craftsman [τεχνιτην] would use his tools [οργανον], and that the soul

receives the imprint [παραδεχοµενησ την τυπωσιν] which is produced in the body as a result

243Cf. also On Intellectual Beauty 1, 30 and 40, 3, 30-35, and 9, 45-50.

244On the Difficulties of the Soul (I) 25, 30-35; cf. Meno 85 e sq. and Phaedo 72 e. All my translations

and paraphrases of the Difficulties is based on Difficultés relatives à l'ame I. Ennéades (Trans. Bréhier)

IV (1927) Bk. 3 (64-101).

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of the soul's command (26, 1-5). But, argues Plotinus, that does not mean that memory

necessarily belongs to a composite [κοινου] of the body and the soul (as the Philebus argues),

because the soul has already received the impression [παραδεξαµενησ τον τυπον] which

memory retains or loses (26, 10; cf. 26, 40). By displacing the experiences common to body

and soul onto sensation, Plotinus purifies the memory from any bodily existence. 245

The question of the role of the senses in memory is taken up afresh in the course of

Plotinus's distinction between two kinds of memory, which he illustrates with an example

from Odysseus's encounter with Hercules in Hades (Odyssey XI). Hercules's phantom

image [ειδωλον] remembers only the events of its life (27, 5-10). But, Plotinus speculates, if

Hercules himself were able to speak, separated from his image [ανευ του ειδωλου] (10-15),

he would be able to remember events which took place outside of his life [εξω βιου] (20-25).

In other words, Hercules himself is able to remember the life of his soul beyond the life of the

particular body in which it temporarily resided. Plotinus is distinguishing between human

memory and divine. This distinction neatly corresponds to the concept of memory in the

Philebus which describes how we remember the things we experience, and that in the

Phaedrus which describes how we remember the eternal forms we contemplated before our

soul fell to earth. Plotinus distinguishes the concepts of memory which Plato holds to be

related.

245Plotinus, in an oblique way, seems to insist on the fact that his argument that memory is not a sensual

faculty is a disagreement with Plato. He does so in the process of countering the argument that the soul

can only remember sensual impressions [αισθητων τυπουσ] because these impressions are made in the

body (26, 25). Plotinus responds that these imprints are not the "imprints of a seal" [ενσφραγισεισ], nor

an "impression on resisting matter" [αντερεισεισ η τυπωσωισ], nor even a "blow [ωθισµοσ] or a surface

covered in wax" [εν κηρω] (26, 30-35). The quotation marks are placed in Plotinus's texts by Bréhier, as

if Plotinus were citing someone, though without speculating on the source of the citation. I would

suggest that the argument rejected by Plotinus is that of the Thaetetus 191 d.
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Plotinus, after asking several questions of his own distinction, returns to the

relationship between memory and sensation. If memory is distinct from sensation [αισθησισ],

he argues, memory must have had a sensation of the object it remembers before it remembers

it. This leads Plotinus to argue that memory remembers an image [φαντασµα] of the sensation

(29, 20-25). All sensation ends in an image, which remains after the sensation has passed (25-

30). Sensuous memory [µνηµη; 'sensuous' is supplied by the context] is a faculty of the

imagination [φανταστικου] (30-35). Imagination, at this stage of the analysis, allows the

sensual to be taken up into the soul. But, if there are two memories, and hence two

imaginations, 246 then how do these relate to each other? Plotinus argues that we cannot

simply say that the intelligible imagination represents the intelligible, and the other the

sensuous, for in that case each being would consist of two completely unrelated beings. Each

memory must remember both the intelligible and sensible (31, 5-10). It follows that there will

be two memory images of each thing we remember. And the sensual image is related to the

rational image as an image to its copy: the rational soul produces a single image, while the

other accompanies it like a shadow [παρακολουθουσησ] or a weak light [σκιασ] (31, 10). In

other words, the memory of the rational soul is able to see the supersensual in the sensual,

whereas the sensual memory is limited to the sensual.

Plotinus's rational memory is similar to some extent to Plato's divine memory: both

allow us to see the supersensual world through the sensual. But Plato's concept of memory in

the Phaedrus does not admit of the division to which Plotinus subjects his higher memory.

The memory of the divine is only possible through its sensual image; the more sensually the

image is seen, the more intelligibly the intelligible. With Plotinus on the other hand, one

memory is lost in the sensual, the other sees through it. Thus, Plotinus writes that the higher

soul must readily forget what comes to it from the lower, and that the more it reaches toward
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the intelligible, the more it forgets the things of the lower world (pt. 32). Plato's soul, when it

is freed of the body, is also able to approach the intelligible world without encumbrance from

the senses; but Plotinus is describing the memory of an embodied soul. And his higher

memory does what Plato's divine memory cannot do: it leaves behind the sensual reminder,

and makes its way to the intelligible sphere itself. 247

Returning to Plato, we find that inspiration also participates in mimesis in the sense

that the inspired one copies the source of his inspiration. In the Ion inspiration transmits the

power to inspire, which makes the inspired one analogous to the source of his inspiration.

This kind of imitation itself resembles the knack and routine associated with Sophistry, in so

far as both the imitator of the appearance of art and the imitator of the source of inspiration

imitate without understanding. This can be seen in the Ion, and in the description of poets by

Socrates in the Apology:

I soon made up my mind about poets too. I decided that it was not wisdom [σοφια]

that enabled them to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct [φυσει] 248 or inspiration

[ενθουσιαζοντεσ], such as you find in seers and prophets who say many beautiful

things [λεγουσι … πολλα και καλλα] without knowing what they say

246There is also, writes Plotinus, an imagination to which the divine memory belongs (30).

247This difference is not without relation to Plotinus's suspicion of the other, and to his systematisation

of Plato's writing on art. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor S. R. L. Clark of the

Philosophy Department, University of Liverpool, for drawing my attention to the relevance of these

passages to my argument.

248'[D]on naturel' (Apologie de Socrate. Trans. and ed. Maurice Croiset. Œuvres complètes I (1920).

140-173).
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[ισασιν δε ουδεν ων λεγουσι]. 249 It seemed clear to me that poets were in much the

same case [παθοσ και οι ποιηται πεπονθοτεσ], 250 and I also observed that the very

fact that they were poets made them think that they had a perfect understanding of all

other subjects [ταλλα σοφωτατων], when they had nothing of the kind

[α ουκ ησαν] 251 (Apology 22 c).

Just as inspiration makes possible a divine version of desire, and a divine version of imitation

by images, so too it makes possible a divine version of the knack and routine:

Just so each man lives after the pattern [εκαστον] of the god in whose chorus he was

[during his soul's voyage in the heavens], honouring him by imitating [µιµουµενον]

him so far as he can …. So each selects his love from the ranks of the beautiful

according to his disposition, and fashions and adorns him like a statue [αγαλµατον],

as if he were himself his god, in order to honour him and celebrate his mystic rites'

(Phaedrus 252 d).

Just as the beloved is the image of the virtues, his lover imitates the gods in following him.

The perception of divine beauty is an act with affinities to reading: we see the

sensual beauty and interpret it as divine beauty, just as we interpret marks on a piece of paper

to arrive at their meaning. This would make the beloved's body analogous to a text, a

comparison which the Phaedrus repeatedly makes explicit. Thus Phaedrus himself, who

249Trans. modified. Tredennick reads 'deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least

what they mean', Croiset 'n'ont pas la science de ce qu'ils disent.'

250Similar formulation to theon pathos peponthenai.

251Trans. modified. Tredennick reads 'of which they were totally ignorant', M. Croiset, more accurately,

with ''sans l'etre le moins du monde'.

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carried the text which is the pharmakon that draws Socrates out of town, also 'bewitched

[καταφαρµακευθεντοσ]' (242 e) Socrates: both Phaedrus and the text are pharmaka. Socrates

makes the parallels between speeches and the body explicit, during his discussion of rhetoric:

'every speech should be put together like a living creature, as it were with a body of its own,

so as not to lack either a head or feet, but to have both middle parts [µεσα] and extremities, so

written as to fit both each other and the whole [ολω]' (264 c). 252 Socrates applies this parallel

to his scientific analysis (in the sense of breaking down into its constituent parts) of Lysias'

speech: 'just as a single body naturally has its parts in pairs, with both members of each pair

having the same name, and labelled respectively left and right, so too the two speeches

[Lysias's, and Socrates's first speech] regarded derangement [i.e. love and madness] as

naturally a single form in us' (266 a). This is reinforced by Socrates's discussion of writing, in

which he personalises it as the child of its author, an illegitimate child who is dragged around

and who can't speak for himself. 253

This analogy is born out later on in the dialogue by Socrates's narration of the writing

myth. Theuth, the inventor of writing, tells king Thamus:

But this study, King Thamus, will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their

memory [µνηµονικωτερουσ] […]." Thamus replied "[…] your invention will produce

forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it […] as through reliance on

252Can we hear an echo of this in Aristotle? 'We have laid down that a tragedy is an imitation of an

action that is complete in itself, as a whole [ολησ] of some magnitude, for a whole may be of no

magnitude to speak of. Now a whole [ολον] is that which has beginning, middle [µεσον] and end'

(Poetics VII, 1450b20-25).

253This is of course one of the main points of 'La pharmacie de Platon'. Cf. Phaedrus 275 e - 276 a, as

well as the reference to Lysias as the father of Socrates's first speech (256 e), to Theuth as the father of

letters (275 a), and the discussion of writing as the seed/sperm (spermata) of its author.
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writing they are reminded [αναµιµνησκοµενουσ] from outside [εξωθεν] by alien

marks [αλλοτριων τυπων], not from inside, themselves by themselves: you have

discovered an elixir [φαρµακον] not of memory [µνηµησ] but of reminding

[υποµνησεωσ]. (Phaedrus 274 e - 275 a).

The word anamimnesomenous, which is used here to describe what writing does when it

reminds the reader of the truth, is exactly the same word as the one used to describe what the

beloved does when he reminds his lover of the supersensual. The use of the word tupos

should also detain us. It is used in the Republic to mean 'model', specifically the sort of story

which should provide a model of behaviour for children:

The beginning of any process is most important, especially for the young and

tender[.] It's at that time that it is most malleable and takes on any pattern [τυποσ]

one wishes to impress on it [and fashion it with]. 254 […] Then shall we carelessly

allow the children to hear any old stories' (II, 377 a-b). 255

In Republic II, tupos designates the model as the original, but here, tupos is the mark, the

copy of the thought of which it is the reminder. Writing is therefore also presented as an

imitation, but with a word whose ambiguity betrays the subordination attempted by Plato. 256

This we find confirmed when Socrates says that 'writing has this strange [δεινον] feature,

which makes it like painting. The offspring of painting stand there as if alive, but if you ask

them something they preserve a quite solemn silence. Similarly with written words

254Plattetai not translated by the negligent Grube and Reeve. Cf. Chambry: 'parce que c'est à ce

moment qu'on façonne et qu'on enfonce mieux l'empreinte dont on veut marquer un individu'.

255Cf. Anna Greco. 'Plato on Imitative Poetry in the Republic' 147-153. The Journal of Neoplatonic

Studies 3:1 (Fall 1994). 141-161.

256Cf. 'La pharmacie de Platon' 119-120/105-106.

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[λογοι]: 257 you might think that they spoke as if they had some thought in their heads, but if

you ever ask them about any of the things they say […], they point to just one thing, the same

each time' (275 d). Writing is likened to the painting to which poetry is compared in

Republic X, and analogous to the product of mimesis. It is also, like rhetoric, the preliminary

to knowledge which, unlike knowledge itself, does not know how to apply itself to particular

situations (just as the sham doctor knows the remedies but not when to apply them).

The similarity extends to the fact that writing and painting are lifeless, but

impersonate life. Writing impersonates truth, dangerously undoing the distinction between

life and death. Thus, it is contrasted with another kind of writing, which Phaedrus (in a way

which tallies unconvincingly with his personality, and sounds rather like Socrates speaking

through him) describes in these terms: 'the living and animate speech of the man who knows,

of which written speech [ο γεγραµµενοσ] would rightly be called a kind of phantom

[ειδωλον]' (276 a). Writing is presented as analogous with mimesis in all of its most

disturbing characteristics for philosophy. Writing, like the eikon, is both an imitation and a

reminder. That it should be described as deinon becomes significant in this context. The word

is translated, with respect to Sophocles's polla ta deina ('many are the deinon'), as unheimlich

(uncanny) by Heidegger, and as ungeheuer (monstrous) by Hölderlin.

The features we have identified in writing correspond more broadly to Freud's

uncanny. 258 Writing (along lines germane to those identified by Derrida in 'Plato's Pharmacy')

is the uncanny doppelganger of truth. Lacoue-Labarthe writes that 'Hölderlin did not reserve

257'Written' supplied by translator/context, cf. Rowe's note at 210.

258Cf. of course Derrida's discussion of Freud's discussion of writing, which concludes by finding that

Freud cannot recognise the full uncanniness of the writing machine ('Freud et la scène de l'écriture'

(1966). L'écriture et la différence. 293-340/ 'Freud and the Scene of Writing.' Writing and Difference.

196-231).
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the Ungeheuer just for the translation of the Greek deinon. He made it the word charged with

defining, in its essence, the tragic rapport or "transport": namely the ungeheuer coupling - the

coupling without coupling - of the human and the divine, of the finite and the infinite, which

only separation, itself unlimited, or death could "accomplish".'259 The ungeheuer in Hölderlin

can be compared to the eikon constituted by the beloved. The beloved, as sensual reminder of

the supersensual, is what couples the divine and the human, the finite and the infinite. The

beloved as eikon is potentially deinon, according to Hölderlin's definition, just like

writing. 260

259'Hölderlin ne réservait pas l'Ungeheure à la seule traduction du deinon grec. Il en faisait aussi le mot

chargé de définir, dans son essence, le rapport ou le "transport" tragique: à savoir l'accouplement

ungeheuer - l'accouplement sans accouplement - de l'humain et du divin, du fini et de l'illimité, que

seule la séparation, elle-meme illimitée, ou la mort pouvait "accomplir"' ('A Jacques Derrida' 248). The

essay on the whole provides a brilliant discussion of the Unheimlich relevant to this discussion.

260Writing and the eikon are both representations of living people: the beloved is sacrificed to 'as if he

were' an agalma of a god, writing is like the offspring of painting. Lacoue-Labarthe mentions the

discussion by Pierre-Maxime Schuhl (Platon et l'art de son temps. Paris: PUF, 1952. cf. especially 50

and 94 sq.) of 'the opposition between "animated statues (the living statues [agalmasin] of

Daedalus [my emphasis] or of Pygmalion) and of "inert images" (for example the "mute paintings"

which serve to designate writing in the Phaedrus)' ('Typographie' 221-222 n 73). One of the instances

of the uncanny described by Freud is precisely that of dolls: 'Jentsch believes that a particularly

favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty

whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like a live one. Now,

dolls are of course rather closely connected with childhood life. We remember that in their early games

children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects' (Freud. 'The "Uncanny"'

(1919) 233. Trans. Alix Strachey (1925) considerably modified by James Strachey. The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter SE). 24 vols. Eds. James

Strachey (1954-1973, vols. I-XXIII) and Angela Richards (1974, vol. XXIV). London: Hogarth, 1953-

74. XVII (1955), 219-252). The uncanny is here defined as the imitation of something alive by
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Let us pause here. The beloved, who brings inspiration about, in his role as image

(eikon) and reminder of the supersensual, is analogous to writing, in its role as tupos, as

imitation (eidolon), and as reminder of what we once knew. And those lifeless features of

writing criticised by Plato are also characteristic of the inspiration he praises, as we

demonstrated in our comparison of inspiration as pathos with writing in the generalised sense

articulated by deconstruction. The Phaedrus begins with a devalorised lover analogous with

the mimetic poet expelled from the Republic, and ends with a condemnation both of rhetoric

(in accordance with the broader condemnation of Sophistry in the Platonic text), and of

writing (along the same lines as Plato's broad condemnation of the products of mimesis). In

between lies the praise of love and of the divine lover. 261 It seems then that the divine lover is

something dead, in such a way as the dead imitation can be mistaken for the living original. Freud lists

xenos as the only Greek equivalent of unheimlich (221), but Heidegger's translation of deinon with

unheimlich can be justified by Plato and Freud's respective use of the two words to make analogous

points about writing and imitation. Both also share the assumption that children are pre-eminently

susceptible to believing in the reality of the imitation (cf. Republic X, 598 b-c), or the life of the doll.

261Dr. Filip Karfik, of Charles University in Prague, argues convincingly that the beloved eikon is not

condemned in the same manner as the writing, mimèma and rhetoric which are analogous to it, because

it is alive, whereas the others are considered by Plato as lifeless imitations (this is again in tune with

Lacoue-Labarthe's remark on Socrates's differentiated treatment of dead and living statues in

'Typographie' 221-22 n 73). Karfik points out that Socrates is treated as a living image in the

Symposium, in those places where he is described as ugly on the inside and beautiful on the outside (his

ugly body is the image of his beautiful soul), and when he is compared to a figurine of Silenus. In 'Plato

and the Religious meaning of the Word Εικων' (App. II), Dr. Karfik contrasts Plato's condemnation of

the images of the objects of the sensual world, with his praise in the Timaeus (27 d - 29 b and 92 b) of

the sensual world itself as an image of the divine world. He drew attention to the consonance of this

gesture with the Greek religion of Plato's time, in which divinity was considered to be manifest in the

whole physical world; images were merely offerings to the gods, and not considered to be particularly
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the truth of the sensual lover, and that the beloved (as eikon) is the truth of writing (as

eidolon and minimèma), the divine lover the truth of the poet-Sophist, the beloved of the

Poet-Sophist's mimetic production. But looked at another way, the discussion of writing can

also serve to "remind" the reader of the analogies between the beloved as eikon and writing

as eidolon, but the other way around: to show that the beloved-eikon is like the written-

eidolon. In other words, the discussion of rhetoric and of writing serve to show that the divine

lover is to some extent an appreciator of poetry, and that his beloved is a poem. The curious

structure according to which divine love is valorised by contrast with sensual love and

writing (i.e. poetry), but shown to be analogous with poetry in order to suggest that in the end

divine love might disguise poetry, perhaps responds again to the left-over suspicion (in the

representative of them. Rather than worshipping images, he also argued, the Greeks worshipped at a

temple which did not represent anything. His account of the temple pointed out an aspect of Greek

religiosity which is particularly interesting in respect to Heidegger: the temple sheltered the offering to

the God. In a manner which anticipates Heidegger's poesis, albeit in a far less articulate and explicit

manner, the temple does not represent anything, but shelters and cares for the god. It is on this anti-

representational topos in Greek culture that Heidegger relies when he writes that 'a building, a Greek

temple, portrays nothing' ('The Origin of the Work of Art' (1950) 42. Poetry, Language, Thought.

Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1975). Similarly, poïesis, without representing

anything, provides Being with a clearing in which it can reveal itself as unconcealed: 'The work of art,

however, never represents anything [stellt nie etwas dar; ne présente jamais rien]; for the simple reason

that it has nothing to represent, being itself that which must first create [schafft] what, thanks to it,

enters for the first time into the open [ins offene tritt]' (First version of The Origin of the Work of

Art (1935); quoted in Musica Ficta 180-181/96; trans. heavily modified). The important role of fire in

the Greek religion is connected to this iconoclastic tendency: rather than represent the god, the Greeks

burn offerings to him, and in burning them cancel (but for the ashes) any sensual trace of their gift. This

gesture communicates with the iconoclastic gesture of destroying sensual representations of divinity,

and, more obliquely, with the opposition of creativity (fire) to imitation (images) developed by writers

such as Abrams.
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dialogue rather than the empirical Plato) of poetry. This does not prevent the dialogue from

being an intricate discussion of mimesis and the mimetès, 262 and the episodic narrative

structure of the dialogue from concealing a rigorous if chiasmic sequence of argument on

those subjects. 263

262It is therefore perhaps a little hasty, although not incorrect so far as the essentials are concerned, of

Melberg to write: 'There is no discussion of mimesis in Phaedrus, but the connection between

pharmakon and writing is remarkably similar to the connection between pharmakon and mimesis in

Republic' ('Plato's "Mimesis"' 33). Surprisingly, even Derrida, who after all first identified the structure

of the pharmakon in the Phaedrus, does not see that it is also at work in the great speech on love.

263Plotinus's On Intellectual Beauty, if read as an interpretation of Plato's aesthetics, is in complete

disagreement with our argument on this point. In parts 5 and 6, Plotinus attempts to distinguish logical

arguments from statues, in a manner which underwrites the distinction between the lover as eikon and

writing as eidohlon which the Phaedrus, as I have argued, implicitly calls into question. We should not

think, writes Plotinus, that the gods and the blessed contemplate logical arguments [αξιοµατα;

'propositions'], because nothing is spoken [λεγοµενων] in heaven which is not a beautiful statue

[καλα αγαλµατα; 'belle image'] (5, 20-25). Bréhier's translation of agalmata with 'image' is a justifiable

one, for the context seems to demand that we understand the word in this way. But Plotinus's use of

agalma where eikon might have served his purpose points, I think, to the fact that the statue exemplifies

the direct representation of the divine which is central to Plotinian aesthetics. In a clear reference to

Phaedrus 276 a, Plotinus writes that this image is of the kind which one imagines [εφανταζετο] to be in

the soul of a wise man [εν τη σοφου ανδροσ ψυχη ειναι]. The divine image for Plotinus is like the

writing in the soul in the Phaedrus (of which graphic writing is the eidohlon). Plotinus indeed explicitly

opposes the divine images to writing, when he writes that he is talking, specifically, not about written

images [αγαλµατα δε ου γεγραµµενα; Bréhier mistranslates in my opinion with 'dessins d'images'

('drawings of images')], but real beings [οντα] (5, 20-25). Thus, Plotinus continues in part 6 to argue

that this fact was understood by the wise Egyptians, who do not use written marks [τυποισ γραµµατων;

Bréhier mistranslates again with 'lettres dessinées' ('drawn letters')] which imitate sounds and words

[µιµουµενοισ φωνασ και προφορασ]. Instead, they carve statues [αγαλµατα δε γραψαντεσ] (6, 1-5), each

of which corresponds to a distinctive thing, and is understood immediately [υποκειµενον και αφροον],
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The two forms of writing contrasted by Plato in the writing myth are thus analogous

to the two ways of reading a symbol which Plato avoids in his description of divine love: if

the beloved reminded in the way graphic writing does, he would be a mere eidolon in the

world of the senses for a supersensual sphere to which he was not connected. If he reminded

in the way writing in the soul does, his sensual being would only be a transitory moment in

the access to the supersensual. But the soul's present attachment to a body makes the act of

reading a difficult one: 'Now in the earthly likenesses of justice and self-control […] there is

no illumination, but through the dulled organs just a few approach their images and with

difficulty observe the nature of what is imaged in them; but before [in the heavens] it was

possible to see beauty blazing out' (Phaedrus 250 b). Only in the heavens is it possible to see

beauty blazing out, to apprehend it directly; on earth, a difficult act of reading 'through dulled

organs' is necessary. But this reading is difficult, not futile, it still enables the lover to

unlike reasoning or deliberation [διανοησισ ουδη βουλευσισ] (6, 5-10). The implicit model for

Plotinus's wise Egyptians is King Theuth. They will not use the science of writing which employs marks

(tupoi), and oppose it to a sign which works like writing in the soul, communicating directly, without

the pitfalls of reasoning. The divine image, argues Plotinus, is not written: there is no analogy between

the image-lover who reminds and whom Plato praises, and the written mark which reminds and which

Plato (via Socrates and Theuth) condemns. I would like to suggest that this passage is a mixture of

blindness and insight, which identifies correctly the fear of this analogy which is active in Plato's text,

and which therefore exerts itself to deny that analogy, and to hide the implicit recognition of it which is

also in Plato's text. This gesture corresponds once more to the suspicion of the other which we

identified above in Plotinus, and of which writing and mimesis are the object in Plato. This suspicion

requires Plotinus to assume that there is an image which is not affected from outside by the other, and

which therefore is not written. As we shall verify below, this assumption also allows him to posit a

direct contact with the intelligible sphere while the soul is part of the body, and hence a perception of

the beautiful and memory of the supersensual which does away with the senses. Both, as we have

verified, are possibilities discounted by Plato.

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'observe the nature of what is imaged'. Socrates's concession to memory is that it is charged

with this difficult task. Memory takes place in the irremediable absence of the divine; it

makes possible a kind of virtual experience of a divine sphere which cannot be experienced

directly. It is this absence which makes it necessary for the memory of the divine to proceed

through the senses. Memory is the principle by which the feelings the poet/sophist was

condemned for pandering to, are oriented toward the supersensual.

With this we arrive again at aesthetics. The mimetic poet discussed in § 2 only

corresponded to one half of the aesthetic equation, namely art as sensual expression and

partial adequation to the truth. The development we have just witnessed in the

Phaedrus transforms that sensual expression into a sensual presentation of a spiritual content.

And the relation of partial adequation of the aesthetic work to the truth remains. During

Socrates's discussion of rhetoric he is faced with the claim that 'in the law-courts no one cares

[…] for the truth about these things, but only for what is convincing [πιθανου]; and this is

what is probable [εικοσ]' (272 d). This is broadly consonant with Aristotle's remarks that 'the

poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened [τα γενοµενα], but a kind of

thing that might happen [γενοιτο], i.e. what is possible [δυνατα] as being probable [εικοσ] or

necessary' (Poetics IX, 1451a35). So too is the continuation of the sentence in the Phaedrus

'one should not even say what was actually done [τα πραχεντα], if it is improbable

[µη εικοτωσ], but rather what is probable [εικοτα]' (227 d) with, 'a likely impossibility

[αδυνατα εικοτα] is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility [δυνατα απιθανα]'

(XXIV, 1460a25). The probable (eikota) is related etymologically to the image (eikon). This

places rhetoric, writing, and the beloved at a stroke in the realm of the loose connection to

truth characteristic of the aesthetic concept of imitation. Socrates counters the claim of the

rhetoricians with the reminder that 'this "probability" [εικοσ] comes about in the minds of

ordinary people because of a resemblance [οµοιοτητα] to the truth; and we showed only a

few moments ago that in every case it is the man who knows the truth who knows best how to
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discover these resemblances' (273 d). The imitation is not the truth, but stands in a

subordinate relation to it, which is adjudicated by 'the man who knows', i.e. the philosopher.

Aristotle, and all aesthetic attempts to describe mimetic literature as "free to be different from

although still instructive in some way about" the truth, accepts the premises of this definition

while disputing its axiology.

After the remarks about the two kinds of writing we discussed a paragraph ago,

Socrates compares the author to a farmer sowing his seeds: 'will he [the serious farmer] sow

them with serious purpose during the summer in some garden of Adonis, and delight in

watching it become beautiful within eight days, or would he do that for the sake of

amusement [παιδιασ] on a feast-day [εορτησ], when he did it at all' (276 b). As we saw

above, mimesis and Sophistry are described as play (paidias), as is writing. 264 Writing is

given its own space by Socrates here, both temporally (the feast-day) and spatially (the

garden of Adonis). And this space is play, a respite from seriousness. This corresponds to the

aesthetic definition of art by philosophy as entertainment and sensual gratification, albeit as a

kind of entertainment which is not without relation to serious/spiritual purposes (the feast

always comes to an end, Adonis's garden eventually gets put to serious use). Underlying this

definition is the presentation of writing as a child, and that of play (paidia) as the province of

the child (paidikos). Aesthetics grants art a place on the way to philosophy, just as childhood

leads to manhood. And that which lies 'on the way' to the sphere of philosophy, to the divine,

is of course the beloved (paidikos), who reminds by leading from the sensual to the

264Nietzsche's artist in the 'Will to Power as Art' seems in part to be a rehabilitation of playing: 'The

phenomenon "artist": is still the most transparent: - to see through it to the basic instincts of power,

nature, etc.! […] [¶] "Play," the useless - as the ideal of him who is overfull of strength, as "childlike."

The childlikeness" of God, pais paizon' (# 797 (1885-1886), 419; cf. # 816 (March-June 1888),

432).Cf. also Mihai Spariosu. Literature, Mimesis and Play: Essays in Literary Theory. Tübingen:

Narr, 1982.
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supersensual, who is the half-way house between the two. And to emphasise the structural

links between writing as game (paidia) and the beloved (paidikos), Socrates compares

writing to the garden of the mythical paidikos Adonis.

It is along similar lines that both Heidegger, and Nehamas and Woodruff in the

preface to their translation of the Phaedrus, view the dialogue. In his chapter on the

Phaedrus in Nietzsche, Heidegger writes that in the Phaedrus

Art, by bringing forth the beautiful, resides in the sensuous, and that it is therefore far

removed from truth, it then becomes clear why truth and beauty […] must separate

from one another. But the severance […] is not in Plato's view one which arouses

dread; it is a felicitous one. The beautiful elevates us beyond the sensuous and bears

us back into the true (Ch. 23, 198).

Heidegger sees the role of art, as presented in the Phaedrus, as a redemption of the distance

between the sensual and the supersensual, between the distance which the Republic showed

to lie between the mimetic image and the truth. This, for all Heidegger's relish in the

dialogue, presents Plato's view of art in the Phaedrus as broadly consonant up to a point with

the aesthetics of Kant, 265 which Heidegger describes without naming it in the third moment

of his history of aesthetics (Nietzsche Ch. 13, 83-84). The fourth moment in Heidegger's

history, namely the Hegelian moment (84-85), takes the process of reconciliation one step

further. Speculative and dialectical philosophy for Hegel is able to think Being in its purity.

Having done so, it no longer needs art, having aufgehoben the sensual/material negative of

thought.

265The question of just how far this is the case will be posed by our next chapter.
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Nehamas and Woodruff write as though they occupied that very moment. They argue

that the Phaedrus derives its unity from its critique of rhetoric (xxxviii), and that its first

three speeches function only as illustrations of rhetoric. Their explanation of why love was

chosen as a theme for speeches designed to exemplify the shortcomings of rhetoric, is based

on an assumption regarding the Phaedrus's chronological position in Plato's corpus. 266 The

Phaedrus' great speech on love, they argue, represents the views of Plato's middle dialogues

(e.g. the Republic and the Phaedo), which Plato abandons in later dialogues (particularly the

Philebus). Examination of the translators' argument reveals that, for them, the difference

between Plato's middle and late dialogues centers around the view the dialogues take of

myths. Plato, they argue, abandons, in the later dialogues, the paradigmatic theory of forms -

in which the forms are perfect exemplars of the things of which they are the form - in favor of

the theory of forms as collection and division (exemplified both in the Philebus and in the

Phaedrus' discussion of rhetoric). Plato presents each form as independent and self-sufficient

in the middle dialogues, which, the translators argue, contradicts 'the idea that the forms are

closely connected with one another and that to know a form is to know its connections':

According to the late dialogues, the forms constitute a great network of essentially

interrelated objects […] [In the Parmenides] There is no way to account for the

relation, if any, between the forms and their instances (Parmenides 130 b - 134 e).

But when the Philebus discusses collection and division it leaves us with the

impression [!] at least [!!] that the connections between the world of forms and the

266Cf., for example, 'Plato had already addressed eròs rhetorically in the Symposium, and he may well

have thought it an appropriate subject for his discussion of rhetoric - all the more if he has changed

some of his views on eròs in the meantime' (xxxix).

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world of sensible objects are much more intimate. Division of a form, for example,

may end precisely when we reach the countless objects that fall under it (xliii). 267

The supersensible, Nehamas and Woodruff argue, is no longer so remote in 'later'

Plato. By collection and division - by the exercise of reason - directed at sensible objects, we

can arrive at the forms. The absolute absence of the forms from the sensible world, around

which the Phaedrus and the Republic's discussion of poetry is organised, is no longer in force

in the later dialogues. Although the translators do not point this out, they assume implicitly

that Plato's position in the later dialogues becomes very similar to Aristotle's (and Plotinus's).

As every schoolboy is taught, the forms in Aristotle do not exist independently of matter, but

are only present in the particular things of which they are the form. 268 Any thing in the world

is just this combination of matter shaped by form, or form shaping matter. The translators,

due no doubt to constraints of space, are able only to gesture towards the viewpoint for which

Plato abandons the paradigmatic theory of forms of the middle dialogues. The position that

by dividing the things of this world up, and then collecting them into categories, we can

arrive at their essence, implies, I would argue, that it is language which constitutes the

essence of each thing. The rational essence of each thing is the linguistic category under

which its manifestations are collected. The philosophy of the later dialogues, which divides

and collects, sounds suspiciously like analytic philosophy (and analytic philosophy often

invokes Aristotle as its precedent). Plato, the translators argue, abandons the metaphysical

notions of the middle dialogues for the philosophy which, in the twentieth century,

confidently thought it could break with metaphysics.

267The translators credit this analysis to Dorothea Frede's introduction (xx-xxx) to the Philebus.

Indiannapolis: Hackett, 1993.

268Cf. T. S. Eliot. 'The Development of Leibnitz' Monadism' 195. Knowledge and Experience in the

Philosophy of H. H. Bradley (1916; 1964). Ed. Anne C. Bolgan. London: Faber, 1964. App. I (177-

197)/ first published in The Monist 26 (October 1916). 534-556.

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The consequence for the translators of our having reached the forms through

philosophy, is that we do not require the images of the great speech on love in order to

represent those forms. 269 It is from the vantage point of possessing the truth that Plato-

Nehamas-and-Woodruff is able to dispense with myths (as Hegel claimed to be able to

dispense with art):

We can now read Socrates' Great speech as Plato's farewell to the theory of forms it

describes. What the speech shows is that the middle theory of Forms is as good as a

good story - good enough to lead some people to philosophy, and perhaps good

enough to have led Plato himself to it. But once you get there [!] - really there [!!] -

you realize that philosophy consists in the austere practice of collection and division,

defining the kinds of things there are and distinguishing them from everything else.

The theory of Forms as we have come to know it in Plato's middle works has had its

use; and it may still have an important role to play in firing the imagination. […]

269One aspect of the change from the middle to the late view, according to the translators, is Plato's

abandonment of the theory of the divided soul. Because the soul is divided into a sensual and a

philosophical part in the Phaedrus, it is distracted from its contemplation and rememoration of the

supersensible truth by the sensual part's desires. Although the Symposium was, according to the

translators, written before the Phaedrus, it already articulates the views of the later dialogues (this

inconsistency is explained by the translators, as we shall see below, by the fact that the Phaedrus is

written as a valediction to the views of the middle dialogues). And the consequence of moving from the

middle to the late views is explicitly phrased in terms of removing the obstacles to the contemplation of

the supersensible truth: 'An undivided soul, all of it always desiring what it considers best, is subject to

no such conflicts' (xxxix).

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Socrates' great speech exudes gratitude for what first made [the philosophical] life

possible. It is a farewell to a dying friend 270 […] (xlv).

It would be crude to misinterpret the 'you' of 'once you get there' to be a less elitist manner of

saying 'once one gets there'; I suggest that Nehamas and Woodruff are speaking in their own

name, and describing their experience of following in (the later) Plato's footsteps. Only such

an interpretation can do justice to the sentence's positively messianic strength. One feels deep

humility before two men who have 'really' been to philosophy, and gratitude that they should

consent to come back, and share their experience. From such an exalted point of view, art can

only be viewed as aesthetic. Like Hegel, they must view art as something past, which once

served its use, but is of use no more to the one who has reached the promised land of

philosophy. Their argument assumes in fact that the use of the great speech (and more widely

of literature) is to lead people to philosophy.

This is of course the archi-traditional role granted to aesthetics by philosophy, and to

rhetoric by Socrates in the Phaedrus: philosophy, from the position of knowing the truth,

grants to rhetoric/aesthetics the secondary position of leading people to the truth. The

translators argue that the great speech should be read as rhetoric, and specifically as rhetoric

suited to leading Phaedrus's unphilosophical soul to philosophy; its descriptive richness is

270The translators do not comment on the glaring similarity between the attitude to myths which they

attribute to Socrates in the Phaedrus, and Socrates's attitude to the poets he expels in the Republic.

Nietzsche attributes a similar view of myths to Socrates when he argues that the abstract and scientific

age in which he lives is 'the result of that Socratism which is bent on the destruction of myth'. (The Birth

of Tragedy (1872) § 23, 136. The Birth of Tragedy & The Case of Wagner. Trans. and ed. Walter

Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967. 17-144). As we shall see below, the Phaedrus's refusal to

say goodbye to myths enables it to suggest roles for both poetry and music quite close to Nietzsche's

own.
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only made necessary because of Phaedrus's unphilosophical attachment to such

grandiloquence: 'What if Plato simply wants to communicate instead that philosophy is the

most important part of life? In that case, the theories of the speech, which Socrates presents

so colorfully, will turn out to be the means by which he tries to move Phaedrus to realize that

philosophy is superior to a life which finds its greatest pleasures in rhetoric' (xliv). Rhetoric

is described in the Phaedrus as a form of play, and Nehamas and Woodruff's attitude to the

Phaedrus is analogous to Edith Hamilton's attitude to the Ion. Neither are able to take

seriously a dialogue in which Plato takes poetry seriously. 271 An important observation is

nevertheless hidden behind their remark, namely that the great speech describes love as being

similar to rhetoric: rhetoric, like divine love, leads to the divine truth. But this undermines the

translators' argument somewhat, because, if the great speech already describes love as

performing the gesture which the translators attribute to the great speech, then that speech

cannot be said to be a mode of thinking which can then be abandoned. The great speech could

even be seen as warning against the translators' interpretation, by presenting the beloved as a

symbol of the divine which cannot be aufgehoben.

I would also argue (as I have argued above) that one can redefine truth in different

terms from Plato's (e.g. according to Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance, and still

grant it the same fundamental elusiveness as Plato. The possession of truth which comes so

easily to the translators is suspicious, and would depend, if thought through coherently, on a

deification of language, similar in fact to the deification of the forms in Plato's middle

dialogues (it is because Plato thinks this through coherently that he makes the forms so

elusive). But if we restrict ourselves to what Socrates says in the Phaedrus, it is very difficult

to accept the translators' interpretation. That is because, surprisingly, their argument does not

271The translators do argue that one can take the Phaedrus seriously, even though 'the whole dialogue,

like the speeches in it' might be 'itself a "game"' (xlvi), but that seriousness is only the patronising

seriousness which aesthetics grants to art.

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take into account the actual valediction which takes place in the Phaedrus, and which

(ironically) Socrates makes after dismissing the boorish logician's account of myths which we

discussed above. Socrates says (in Rowe's translation):

I am not yet capable, in accordance with the Delphic description, of 'knowing

myself'; it therefore seems absurd to me that while I am still ignorant of this subject I

should inquire into things which do not belong to me. So then saying goodbye

[χαιρειν] to these things, and believing what is commonly thought about them […]'

(229 e - 230 a).

Appostolos Athanassakis refers to the following argument concerning the meaning of chaire:

The chaire of the rhapsodic envoy is more than just 'hail'272 or 'farewell.' However,

even if the meaning is more propitiatory than salutatory, the choice for equivalents

closer to the literal meaning, 'be glad,' 'rejoice,' is bound to be fruitless, as those who

know the literal meaning of 'good-bye' or 'hail' will readily agree. It is only for lack of

better approximations that I have retained the traditional translations. After all,

chaire (now usually chairete) may mean hello or good-bye in Greece today, but it

may also mean hail, as it does in the Greek national anthem. It all depends on the

occasion and the context. 273

272The chaire is perhaps what is parodied by Byron's 'Hail Muse! et cetera' (Don Juan (1819-1824).

Eds. T. G. Steffan and W. W. Pratt. Second revision. London: Penguin, 1982. Canto III, i, 1).

273Appostolos Athanassakis. 'Introduction' xiii. The Homeric Hymns. Trans. and ed. Appostolos

Athanassakis. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. x-xiii. Athanassakis is referring to

Professor Bundy's article 'Quarrel between Kallimachos and Apollonios' (especially at 49-55).

Californian Studies in Classical Antiquity 5 (1972). 39-95.

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The act of chairein is ambiguous, and cannot be interpreted as an unequivocal valediction to

myths. And this corresponds closely to the ambiguity of Socrates's own position, which relies

on the myths it condemns. It is therefore a little hasty of Rowe to translate with 'goodbye',

and misleading of Hackforth to give 'I don't bother with'. But it is positively embarrassing of

Nehamas and Woodruff to - without so much as a footnote - closely follow Hackforth with 'I

do not concern myself with them', after arguing that the Phaedrus is a valediction to the very

theory of forms which meant that Plato required myths (the weakness of this translation is

perhaps made up for by its apt description of the translators' attitude to Plato's words). Had

they been more attentive to the meaning of chaire in their translation, they might have

reconsidered their view that Plato's great speech is simply being dismissed "on the way" to

philosophy.

Derrida paraphrases the chaire with 'envoyer promener les mythes' ('La pharmacie de

Platon' 77), which means both to release them, to let them go for a walk or even go out to

play, but equally could also be translated as 'tells them to "go take a walk!"' or 'to get lost.'274

The greeting of myths which is contained in Socrates's chairein corresponds to the refusal to

sublimate the sensuality of the paidikos-eikon, who, as we have seen, stands in a similar

relation to the supersensual as do the myths (one thinks here in particular of the tale of Er

which closes the Republic). Moreover, unpacking the semantic range of chaire shows that it

can mean both veneration and dismissal, which is analogous and different to the attitude

taken up toward the poet by Socrates in Republic III. The analogy further underlines the

parallels between Socrates's expulsion of the poet and his criticism and then acclaim of the

lover. The difference, i.e. the subtle refusal to say goodbye to myths which closer attention to

chaire reveals, suggests that Socrates's attitude to poetry is already changing at this stage of

the Phaedrus. Socrates says of the proof of the divinity of love constituted by his myth of the

274B. Johnson's 'sending myths off' (69) suffers from the same limitations as the English translation of

chaire which we discussed above.

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journey of the soul, 'the proof will be disbelieved by the δεινοισ, believed by the wise' (245

c). Rowe translates deinois, rightly of course, with 'the clever'. But are not those who

disbelieve the myth also those who, like the speculative logician, go beyond it? It is this

transgression which Hölderlin identifies as the monstrous, and Socrates's apparently throw

away line is perhaps a warning for such tendencies. Both Heidegger's and Nehamas and

Woodruff's readings assume too easily that it is possible to decide about the eikon, just as

Heidegger decided about mimesis. As we saw, Heidegger's decision about mimesis was only

made possible by his avoidance of its abyssal and unheimlich nature. What the last section of

this chapter will attempt is to show how the Phaedrus prevents such an easy decision with a

tragic interruption of the speculative and of the aesthetic.

8. Tragedy

We are going to end this chapter by looking at how the Phaedrus interrupts the aesthetic, and

the speculative into which it can so easily be collapsed ('like "Kantism" into a

"Hegelianism"') ('Economimesis' 71). This interruption is based, in the first instance, on the

comparison of the eikon to writing (to the graphè). The unheimlich and deinon characteristics

of writing are what interrupts the aesthetic. Lacoue-Labarthe summarises the speculative

dialectic in the following terms:

The thought which masters the corruptible and death, the determination of the

negative and its conversion into work and production power, the assumption of the

contradictory and the 'relève'275 as the very procedure of the True or of the Subject's

275'Relever' literally means to raise up again; 'la relève' means 'the lifting up' or 'uplifting', and is the

French translation proposed by Derrida for 'Aufhebung' in 'Le puits et la pyramide: introduction à la

sémiologie de Hegel' (1968; 1971). Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. 79-127/ 'The Pit and

the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology.' Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Brighton:
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self-conception, of absolute Thought -, we have known then for a long time that the

dialectic, the theory of death, supposes […] a theatre: a structure of representation

and a mimesis, a closed space, distant and preserved […], where death in general, the

decline [décliner 'to decline'] and the disappear [disparaitre 'to disappear'] can

contemplate "itself", reflect/think [réfléchir] "itself" and interiorise "itself". 276

Writing as death is the exteriority which Plato, and the speculative thought which continues a

version of his project, seeks to master. 277 Writing is also the site of the interruption of the

self-engendered subject by the Other as absolutely other. 278 As is by now absolutely familiar

from Derrida's analyses, writing, in the generalised sense, always involves the Other, and any

attempt to reappropriate it as the enunciation of a Subject unaffected by the Other amounts to

a form of autism. The 'affection by the trace of the Other' (as I would translate up' allotrion

tupon) is inescapable. And it is because of this that the eikon cannot be aufgehoben as it is by

Nehamas and Woodruff (and, in different ways, Plato and Heidegger).

Harvester, 1982. 69-108. Aufhebung is of course the key concept in Hegelian dialectics, and describes

the opposition between the spirit and that which is its negation, and in which the negation of the spirit is

'raised up' into a new term in which that opposition is resolved. Aufhebung is usually rendered as

'sublation' in English.

276'[L]a pensée maitrisante du corruptible et de la mort, la détermination du négatif et sa conversion en

puissance de travail et de production, l'assomption du contradictoire et la "relève" comme le procès

meme de l'autoconception du Vrai ou du Sujet, de la Pensée absolue -, on sait donc depuis longtemps

que la dialectique, la théorie de la mort, suppose […] un théatre: une structure de représentation et une

mimèsis, un espace clos, distant et préservé […] où la mort en général, le décliner et disparaitre, puisse

"se" contempler, "se" réfléchir et "s'" intérioriser' ('La césure du spéculatif' 39-40).

277Cf. again 'Tympan' and 'La pharmacie de Platon'.

278Cf. 'Signature Event Context' and 'Freud et la scène de l'écriture'.

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This, I would argue, is anticipated by Plato in certain parts of his text. 279 Notably, the

joking references to inspiration always presented it as the fact of being pascho, of an

'influence' (this word, like all translations of pathos, is inadequate) from outside, by the

Other. And as we saw in our discussion of writing and rhetoric in the Phaedrus, the

eikon who causes inspiration is compared implicitly by the narrative to the mimesis whose

uncanniness undoes dialectic reappropriation. Inspiration is put on stage in the Phaedrus, but

not on a theoretical stage; the word pathos suggests that it is a tragic experience. This tragic

stage is one which undoes the speculative, rather than one which, as described by Lacoue-

Labarthe, helps accomplish it. This is stated with disarming clarity by Socrates in one of his

definitions of love: 'For of all the sensations coming through the body, sight is the keenest:

wisdom we do not see - the love [ερωτασ; trans. modified] 280 it would cause would be too

terrible [δεινουσ], if it allowed some such clear image [εναργεσ ειδωλον] of itself to reach

our sight, and so too with the other objects of love; as it is, beauty alone has acquired this

privilege, of being most evident and most loved' (Phaedrus 250 d). 281 The accomplishment of

279In this, Plato differentiates himself from contemporary concepts of memory (such as those of Pindar

and Empedocles) which saw it as a means for man to become god and purify himself of his sensual

existence, and an escape from temporality (cf. Vernant, Mythe et pensée 92-94; 98-100). It is just this

becoming God of man which constitutes the accomplishment of the speculative, and which Hölderlin's

concept of tragedy seeks to disrupt.

280Rowe gives 'the feelings of love', for which the Greek has no counterpart; I have restored the original

sentence in order to suggest that the lover is being overwhelmed by a divine eroticism.

281Plotinus does not share Plato's view on this score. He argues that our soul is are able to contemplate

non-sensual beauty directly, without organs [ανευ οργανων], leaving sensation behind

[καταλιποντασ την αισθεσιν] (On Beauty 4, 1-5). Although Bréhier claims that Plotinus borrows parts

of his demonstration from the Phaedrus 249 d sq. (99 n 2), Plato, as Phaedrus 250 d makes explicit,

does not accept the possibility of such a direct contemplation of the intelligible on earth; only the souls,

once they are separated from the body, can contemplate the forms directly. Plotinus here is

distinguishing the beauty of the forms from the beauty of the senses, in a similar manner to his
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the speculative, in which the aesthetic collapses, would be too deinon, like Hölderlin's

ungeheuer. 282 But we saw too that the deinon is that mimetic Other which undoes the

speculative. Another question which is raised by this statement: why would an eidolon of

wisdom be so terrible? Surely the fact that the idol masks truth prevents us from being

affected by the terror of direct contemplation of the divine. The clear image is too terrible,

but so too is the eidolon which substitutes for it. What this suggests is that a Hölderlinian

concept of tragedy as caesura of the speculative underlies Plato's concept of inspiration in the

Phaedrus. The eidolon is deinon because it confronts the spectator with the absolute

remoteness of the divine, but so too is the opposite, the direct sight of the divine. This

suggests that the eidohlon is deinon as the substitute for the deinon of the accomplishment of

the speculative. The deinon in Plato corresponds to both definitions of the unheimlich which

distinction between the two kinds of memory. To Plato's concept of beauty as a sensual reminder of the

divine, Plotinus opposes two memories and two beauties, one each for the supersensual, one each for

the sensual. To be sure, the non-sensual objects of beauty discussed by Plotinus in part 4 do not

correspond exactly to Plato's divine sphere, and consists of less elevated dianoetic entities such as the

beauty of occupations [καλλουσ επιτηδευµατον], science, temperance and justice. But implicit in the

possibility of progressing to a direct contemplation of these beauties is the possibility of progressing

from there onto the next, and ultimately to the contemplation of the One (this will be discussed further

below in Ch. 2 § 3 n).

282This corresponds to the definition by Schelling, cited by Freud, of the Unheimlich as 'the name for

everything that ought to have remained […] secret and hidden but has come to light' (cited in 'The

"Uncanny"' 224). Schelling, uncannily, describes as uncanny that which his own philosophy, according

to Hölderlin, sets out to accomplish; he shares, in this definition, Hölderlin's fear of the speculative as

something uncannily sacriligious. Freud interprets the statement by assuming that 'what ought to have

remained hidden' is the unconscious rather than the divine (241), in connection with his general

definition of the uncanny as something in which a once familiar but now repressed unconscious desire

returns as unfamiliar. The unconscious often performs the same function with Freud as the divine does

for speculative philosophy (it is, for example, the source of poetic inspiration).
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we saw Freud take up: it is both the uncanny revelation of that which should have been

concealed, and the uncanny impersonation of life by death which interrupts that revelation.

This is seen most clearly when the absence of the divine is experienced, literally, by

the lover, at the moment when he and his beloved are separated.

When [the soul] is apart [χωρισ] [from its beloved] and becomes parched [αυχµηση],

the openings of the passages through which the pleasures push their way out are dried

up and closed, so shutting off their shoots, and these, shut in with the desire, throb

[φηδωσα] like pulsing arteries [σφυζοντα], each of them pricking [εγχριει] at the

outlet corresponding to it, so that the entire soul, stung [κεντουµενη] all over, goes

mad [οιστρα] with pain; but then, remembering [µνηµην] the boy with his beauty, it

rejoices again. The mixture of both these states makes it despair at the strangeness of

its condition [παθουσ], raging in its perplexity [απορουσα λυττα] […] (Phaedrus 251

d-e).

The words used to describe the suffering involved in the separation of the lover from his

beloved are all drawn, not by coincidence, from the tragedians. The state of being away from

the source of inspiration is a pathos, just like inspiration itself. Inspiration and memory, as we

argued before, take place in the absence of the divine, and in the absence of the eikon of the

divine, and so on endlessly. But might this not signify that the absence is irreducible, not

infinitely reappropriable by memory? In fact, the memory which makes the

aesthetic/speculative possible is like Plato's writing-in-the-soul. The similarity of the eikon to

writing makes the absence of the divine, like the absence of the lover, constitutive of divine

love and memory.

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And when the lover is together with his beloved, the absence and the suffering are

still there:

After he has seen him, the expected change comes over him following the shuddering

[φρικησ] - sweating [ιδρυσ] and a high fever [θερµοτεσ]; for he is warmed by the

reception of the effluence of beauty through his eyes, which is the natural

nourishment of his plumage, and with that warmth there is a melting of the parts

around its base, which have long since become hard [] and closed up, so

prevented it from sprouting, nourishment of the quills of the feathers swell and set to

growing from their roots under the whole form of the soul […]. Meanwhile, then, all

of it throbs [ανακηκιελ] and palpitates [ζει], and the experience [παθοσ] is like that

of cutting teeth, the itching [κνησισ] and the aching [αγανακτεσισ] that occur around

the gums when the teeth are just coming through: such is the state affecting the soul

of the man who is beginning to sprout wings - it throbs and aches and tickles as it

grows its feathers. So when it gazes at the boy's beauty, and is nourished and warmed

by receiving particles which come to it in a flood from there - hence, of course, the

name we give them, 'desire' [himeros] 283 - it experiences relief from its anguish

[οδυνησ] and is filled with joy […] (251 b-c).

Inspiration is described here as physical suffering, as the threat of death. Plato makes the

negativity which aesthetics tries to bridge intrinsic to the experience of inspiration. And this

extends, explicitly, to his discussion of writing. Socrates says of the speech of an aspiring

rhetorician: 'So if it stays written down, the author leaves the theatre [θεατρου] delighted; but

if it is rubbed out [εξαλειθη], and he loses his chance of being a speech writer, he and his

friends go into mourning [τενθει]' (258 b). The ephemeral nature of graphic writing always
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exposes it to the risk of death in this particular theatre. Although the lover may cease from his

pains, and although speech may stay written down, it is always affected by the possibility of

erasure, of the need to mourn. That is why Socrates compares a badly composed speech

(which is therefore not organised like a living creature), to the writing on Midas the

Phrygian's tomb. This is the third poem mentioned by the dialogue, and its lines are spoken

by a 'bronze-clad maid, who 'As long as rivers run and trees grow tall' will 'tell the traveller:

Midas rests within' in other words, a statue which always says the same thing. The relation of

the graphè to death and mourning, and the pain involved in the pathos of inspiration, mark a

limit to the aesthetic in Plato's text. The structure of mimesis and iterability invariably affect

the desire of union with the divine, of the theoretical contemplation, with the irreducibility of

absence and death.

This is seen with clarity in two moments of the Phaedrus, which are explicitly

concerned with damaging sight. Sight is the privileged mode of perceiving the supersensual

from the sensual world. This first becomes evident in the description of the effect of love on

the beloved:

So he is in love, but with what, he does not know; and he neither knows what has

happened to him [πεπονθεν] […], but like a man who has caught an eye disease

[οφθαλµιασ] […] is unaware that he is seeing himself in his lover as if in a mirror

[κατοπτρω]. And when his lover is with him, like him he ceases from anguish

[οδυνησ], when he is absent [απη], again like him he longs and is longed for

[ποθει και ποθεται], because his return of love is a reflection [ειδωλον] of love (255

d-e). 284

283Original included by Rowe in Roman letters.

284The experience of meeting one's own image in a mirror is described as uncanny by Freud ('The

"Uncanny"' 248 n 1), at the end of the essay, when Freud is trying to understand why some instances of
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Because the sight is, as we saw above, the privileged organ for beholding the supersensual,

the eye disease symbolises the caesura of the speculative. And the what-has-happened

(pascho) of inspiration is like an eye disease, implying that it actually involves the inability to

reach the supersensual from the sensual (at least as possibility). Plato in this passage presents

the (aesthetic-speculative) possibility of the lovers being together, as well as the possibility of

its interruption when they are apart. But what relates and at the same time divides their gazes

is the mirror, which (as Lacoue-Labarthe demonstrates) reappears again after having undone

the theorisation of the mimetic poet in Republic X. The eye disease separates the lovers even

when they are together, because they relate to each other as reflections in the mirror, as

eidolois.

The eye is threatened a second time in the conclusion to Socrates's redemptive

palinode to love: 'Forgive what went before and grant me your favor [χαριν]; be kind and

gracious do not take away [αφελη] in anger or maim [πηρωσησ] the expertise in love

the return of the repressed familiar are uncanny and others not. Those, he argues who no longer have

any superstitious beliefs, will not experience incidents which seem to confirm superstitions as uncanny.

In other words, a scientific understanding of reality precludes the uncanny (248). He and Ernst Mach

both felt the experience of encountering their image to be uncanny because they 'simply failed to

recognise them as such' (248 n 1). The uncanny here, like in the Phaedrus, is made possible by a failure

of vision to distinguish between self and image, and because of this to adequately "see" the

divine/unconscious. Cf. also Derrida's description of the narrator of Baudelaire's 'La Fausse Monnaie'

staring into his friend/lover's eyes, and being inevitably blind to his eyes or to his seeing (Given

Time 163).
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[ερωτικην µοι τεχνην] 285 which you gave me'. 286 I would translate 'afelè pèrohshs erohtikèn

moi technèn' with 'do not take away or maim my erotic craft'. 287 The beginning of the second

speech, which this sentence concludes, invokes Stethicorus as precedent for such a

recantation; Stethicorus was struck blind after writing a poem which libelled Helen, and

regained his sight after recanting his poem (243 a). As Rowe notes 'Taking away his expertise

in love […] or part of it ('maiming it'), would be the equivalent of the blinding of Homer and

Stethicorus' (191). Rowe's gloss is problematised by one obvious difference between his

description of Socrates's potential punishment, and the punishment of the poets to which he

compares it: the poets suffer physical chastisement, whereas Socrates's punishment (losing

his expertise in love or having it maimed) is more abstract. Freud writes in several places that

being blinded is a symbol for castration, 288 and such a parallel is not out of place in the

Phaedrus, where not only is divine love structurally similar to the sublimation of the

unconscious drives, but where the organ of divine love is the eyes. Divine love is defined as

being reminded of the eternal forms we once saw (247 c - 248 c) by dint of gazing on a

beautiful boy (251 c), and 'the stream of beauty goes back to the beautiful through the eyes

285Cf. Rowe 191 and Nehamas and Alexander 48 n 121. For all the glee with which the latter two

emphasise the (surely obvious) fact that the favour Lysias wants his beloved to bestow on him is sex,

neither shows the remotest awareness of this glaring double entendre.

286αλλα των προτερων τε συγγνωµην και τωδε χαριν εχων, ευµενησ και ιλεωσ την ερωτικην µοι τεχνην

ην εδωκασ µητε αφελη µητε τηρωσησ δι οργην.

287I thank Panagiota Vassilopoulou for her help with this translation.

288Cf. 'The Economic Problem of Masochism' (1924) 162. Trans. Joan Riviere with title rev. by James

Strachey. SE XIX (1961), 159-170; 'The "Uncanny"' 227, 231; 'The Unconscious' (1915) 198 [on the

schizophrenic girl who dreams of having her eyes twisted by her lover]. Trans. C. M. Baines largely

rewritten James Strachey. SE XIV (1957), 159-215; and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). SE IV-V

(1953). Trans. James Strachey. V, 269, 398 n 1 and 443-44.

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[δια τεσ οµµατων] which is the natural way to the soul' (255 b). 289 If sight is the privileged

sense of love, then removing the eye is the destruction of the organ of love.

The two levels of meaning on which Socrates's plea could be interpreted can be seen

in the semantic range of pèrohsès. The first sense of pèreoh is listed by Lydell and Scott as

'to maim, mutilate' in the physical sense; the word is most frequently used in relation to the

limbs of the body. The second sense, described as metaphorical by Lydell and Scott, is 'to

incapacitate', and one of the examples cited is the use in the Phaedrus we are now

considering. Another example of the word's metaphorical use is Aristotle's, to denote

someone incapacitated for practising virtue (Nichomachean Ethics 1099b19). Rowe's

translation with 'maim' does justice to the first definition, and his gloss ('taking part of it

away') to the second. 290 I would suggest that the "metaphorical" performance of pèrohses is

mentioned by Lydell and Scott (and used by the translators) in a manner which attempts to

hide the "literal" performance on which it is based. As we have seen, the maiming from

289'Beauty is found especially in the eyes' (Plotinus, On Beauty 1, 1-5).

290This ambivalence is played out in the other translations we have used. Robin (1933) finds a French

expression ('to make infirm') whose range also includes the concrete and the abstract, but his translation

of technè with 'science' overdetermines it toward the more abstract part of its range: 'cette science de

l'amour que tu m'as accordée par colère ne me la retire pas! ne la rends pas infirme!'. Hackforth's

'wither' (1952) also brings together the abstract and the concrete, but in a poetical manner, in which the

word's concrete performance is already a metaphor for the mutilation designated by the Greek original

(his translation of technè with 'talent' is also over-metaphorical): 'and take not from me the lover's talent

wherewith thou hast blessed me; neither let it wither by reason of thy displeasure'. Nehamas and

Woodruff (1995), although the most "modern" and on the surface (as we saw above n) "sexy"

translation, render pèrohsès with a very modern word, resulting in the most euphemistic of all the

translations, even to the point of politically correct blandness: 'be kind and gracious toward my

expertise at love, which is your own gift to me; do not, out of anger, take it away or disable it'.
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which Socrates asks to be spared is compared to a physical maiming of the eyes, 291 and that

Socrates himself makes clear that divine love goes through the eyes as physical organs.

Divine love does not separate the sensual from the divine, and I shall argue that neither

should the literal sense of pèrohses be concealed by its "metaphorical" (we could in some

cases say 'euphemistic') meaning. The abstract maiming implies the threat of a specific

physical one. Had Socrates intended to make the distinction Rowe and the others attribute to

him, there are many other (non-metaphorical and less embarrassing) words which he could

have used.

Without wishing to deny that Rowe's translation is one possible way of understanding

this remark, I think it makes more sense to posit that Socrates is asking not to be castrated.292

Although tèchnè's main meaning remains 'craft' according to this interpretation, I would argue

that the Greek word allows us to read it at the same time as the implement of craft, as 'tool':

'do not take away or maim my tool of love'. 293 Of course, there is a distinction between these

291Lydell and Scott cite Aristotle's use of pèrohses to describe the mutilation of the eyes in History of

Animals at 620a1 and 498a32.

292Aristotle uses pèrohses in this manner: 'The birds are castrated [εντεχµνονται] at the rump; for after

cauterising them with two or three irons, if the bird is already full-grown the crest becomes pale yellow

and he no longer crows nor tries to mate, while he is a young bird none of these characters even

develops as he grows. It is the same way with men, for if they have been mutilated [πηρωσην] as boys

the later-growing hair does not develop nor does the voice change but continues high-pitched; but if

they are already past puberty the later-growing hair falls out except for the pubic hair (and this

diminishes but remains), but the congenital hair does not fall out, for no eunuch becomes bald. The

voice changes too into the female even in all quadrupeds that are castrated or mutilated [εκτεµνοµενων

… η πηπουµενων] (History of Animals VII-X. Bilingual ed. Trans. and ed. D. M. Balme. Cambridge

MA and London: Harvard UP, 1991. XLIX, 631b25-632a10).

293There is support for such a translation of the word in Lydell and Scott's definition IV of tèchnè, as

meaning the same thing as tèchnèma, or work of art, handiwork. Strabo (i bc) uses the word in this
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two performances of technè, which in the first instance corresponds to the distinction

between the tool and what you do with it. As 'craft', technè would refer to divine "Platonic"

love, with no physical dimension, as 'tool', it would refer to sensual consummated love. What

our discussion of the beloved as eikon has attempted to show is that Plato does not allow the

two kinds of love to exist independently on earth, and this argument is contained in the range

of meaning which attaches to his use of the word technè in this sentence. Socrates fears both

physical and spiritual castration, which cannot be isolated from each other any more than

their opposites, physical and divine love. And if, as I have tried to suggest above, the

technè of love is also the art-product of love, then the beloved eikon is the product both of

technè and of love; the beloved eikon is the technè(maton) of love. The fear of castration is

the fear that the eikon might be taken away. And as we have seen, this threat is constitutive of

the eikon's internal possibility. What underlies the discussion of mimesis which gives the

manner when he writes 'Apart from the number of the tablets placed there, there are other repositories

of votive tablets and some small chapels full of ancient works of art [αρχαιων τεχνων]' (Strabo. The

Geography of Strabo. Bilingual ed. 8 vols. London: Heinemann and Cambridge MA: Harvard UP,

1917-1932. VI (1929). Trans. and ed. Horace Leonard Jones. Bk. 14 (197-385), i § 14). So too

Pausanias: 'The goddess in the temple they call Heavenly; she is of ivory and gold and the work [τεχνη]

of Pleidias' (Elis xxv § 1. Descriptions of Greece. Trans. and ed. W. H. S. Jones. 5 vols. London:

Heinemann, Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1918-1935. III Bk. 6. 1-163. Lydell and Scott also cite

'κρατηρρεσ ανοροσ ευχειροσ τεχνην' as an example, which they accordingly must read as 'there are

some bowls there, the handiwork of a potter'. It must be noted however that Fitzgerald translates with

'There are some bowls there, by a skilful potter' (Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus 472, 100. Trans.

Robert Fitzgerald (1941). Sophocles I. Eds. David Grene and Richard Lattimore. Chicago and London:

U of Chicago P, 1954. 79-155). A similar example cited from Sophocles is 'But he, with arms

unbreakable through the art of Hephasteus [ο δ'εν θ' οπλοισ αρρωζιν Ηεφαιστου τεχνη]' (Sophocles.

Fragments. Trans. and ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard UP, 1996. # 168),

which Lydell and Scott must translate differently from Lloyd-Jones, reading the arms as the technè

which Hephasteus creates, Hephasteus's handiwork.

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Phaedrus its unity is an iconography, in its literal Greek sense of an eikon which is affected

by the iterability of writing, of graphia. The icon on its own can be reduced to aesthetics, the

written mark to Sophistry and idolatry. Thought together in this dialogue, they open up the

possibility of understanding art work in a different way.

9. The Poet Within and Beyond Platonism

This ambivalence in Plato's decision regarding poetry opens up the field for a variety of

rearticulations of the possible roles for poetry found in his text. It is because of this

ambivalence that these rearticulations, in going beyond the Platonic inflection which Plato

gives to the possibilities, are actually faithful to a certain spirit in his writing. One strand of

criticism has attempted to reinstate poetry by showing that it is a privileged form of imitation,

and that this imitation can be used both in the practical world and for moral teaching (from

Aristotle to the aesthetic realists). Others, in defining the role of the poet in opposition to

practical utility and accuracy, and as gratifying the emotions, have revalorised Plato's poet-

Sophist. 294 And those who attempt to find an aesthetic role for such a poet that might also

294John Keats provides an excellent example of this (cf. 'To George Woodhouse' (27 October 1818).

Letters of John Keats. Ed. Robert Gittings. Second ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. 157-158). Cf. also

Wilde’s The Decay of Lying: An Observation (1889). The Oxford Authors Oscar Wilde. Ed. Isobel

Murray. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 215-239, and 'The Preface' (1891). The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The Oxford Authors Oscar Wilde. 48 (I thank Tony Barley of the English Department, University of

Liverpool, for drawing my attention to these passages). The best attempt to elaborate a theory of art

according to a revalorisation of what Plato condemns in the Sophist comes from Méchoulan in his

conclusion to 'Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' (150/148). He argues that art has no transcendence,

and that its vocation is to imitate the sensual world (whether its objects or the actions of the people in

it). It is parasitical on everything (all things, all gestures, but especially on all manners of speaking

about things), and its link to the real world derives from its parasitism on the material reality of

discourse. In cutting across the discourses which it mimics (without having any proper discourse of its
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include intelligence are anticipated by the link between emotions and the intelligence

elaborated in the Platonic text. In particular, the Romantic concept of the inspired poet,

superior to craftsmanship and unfettered by the need for accuracy, but ministering to rational

feelings rather than sensual gratification, merely elaborates a poet along the lines of Plato's

lover. Plato's aesthetics contains a Romantic poet which it invites a future aesthetics to

extract from it. But this extraction, as practised by Kant, takes away the element of tragedy

and of heart-break which accompanies Plato's conception of the lover. What we hope to show

is how writers after Kant, while remaining within the space of his aesthetics, interrupt it by

reintroducing Plato's tragic caesura. This rewriting, although going beyond the "Platonic"

"intentions" of Plato's text, is the sincerest form of imitation.

own), art transforms them. He argues that doxa's dual meaning of 'value' and 'appearance' corresponds

to the academic division between aesthetics and epistemology. By defining art as deriving its value

from its work in the realm of sensual appearance, Méchoulan attempts to simultaneously reunite the two

meanings of doxa and arrive at a new definition of the role of art.

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Chapter II

AESTHETIC IDEAS

Plato - Kant

The devil then sent to Leipsic fair,

For Born's translation of Kant's book;

A world of words, tail foremost, where

Right - wrong - false - true - and foul and fair

As in a lottery wheel are shook.

Five thousand crammed octavo pages

Of German psychologics, - he

Who his furor verborum assuages

Thereon, deserves just seven months' wages

More than will e'er be due to me. 1

1. Muses

1P. B. Shelley. 'Peter Bell the Third' (1819) Pt. VI, xiii-xiv, 518-527. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Eds.

Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York and London: Norton, 1977. 325-347. 'Kant's

book' (although which particular book is a matter for speculation; Born translated the whole critical

philosophy) is one of the reasons given by the poem for Peter Bell's madness. I would like to thank Dr.

Alan Rawes of the University of Liverpool for drawing my attention to this passage.
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In this chapter, we are going to read the analysis of mimesis at work in Kant's Critique of

Judgement as a reading of Plato's Phaedrus. To my knowledge, there are no explicit

references to the Phaedrus anywhere in Kant's work, and even references to Plato in general

there are few. And yet, as is well known, Kant's opposition to empiricism in the name of

rationalism works within a framework inherited from Plato. 2 Moreover, Kant does refer to

2Kant discusses his reading of Plato in the first Critique, arguing that his concept of ideas develops

from Plato, but reinterprets it, in order to liberate it from its inconsistencies: Immanuel Kant. Kant's

Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. Second ed. London and Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1933. Transcendental Doctrine of Elements Pt. II, Div. II, Bk. I, § 1, B370-A319. Kant in

other words develops his concept of ideas through a critical reading of Plato. Méchoulan gives an

interesting account of the relationship of Kant and of the Eighteenth Century to Plato. His description of

Enlightenment aesthetics is particularly close to the analysis we shall attempt to make of Kant. The

establishment of aesthetics in the Enlightenment, writes Méchoulan, came at a time when the sensual

generally was being re-evaluated, although aesthetics had to purify the senses of the contingent (we

shall see that this is also the case with Kant). The artist as inspired genius became like the ancient

theoros, whose perceptions (aisthesis) could reach the truth. The artist had access to the truth, but only

through and in the realm of the senses ('Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis et Doxa' 148/146). This is in a

nutshell what we shall be saying about Kant, but Méchoulan thinks that things are slightly different in

his case. Judgement for Kant is both a common sense (and here the artist is again like the theoros,

whose personal sensations can be expected of everyone), and that which links the understanding to

reason. Kant's theory of subjective judgements with universal validity enables the communication

between reason and understanding, and marks the event of a common sense which pre-exists logic. We

shall examine these issues in more depth later: Méchoulan's analysis shows here for our purposes the

extent to which Kant's aesthetics exist within a Platonic framework. Cf. also Heidegger's analysis of

Nietzsche's view of Kant as an attenuated Platonism (Nietzsche Ch. 24, 205-206). An interesting

account of the conventional opposition of Kant to classical Greece, and of his Jewishness and its

contrast with Hegel's Hellenism, can be found in Geoffrey Bennington. 'Mosaic Fragment: If Derrida

were an Egyptian.' Derrida: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Wood. Oxford and Cambridge, MA:

Blackwell, 1992. 97-119.

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the Phaedrus indirectly in the section of the Anthropology devoted to memory (Gedächtnis):

he writes that 'an ancient one said: "the art of writing has brought memory down (has made it

in part superfluous)".'3 Without naming Plato, Kant has referred to the writing myth in the

Phaedrus. The Phaedrus leads a decidedly charmed intertextual life: it is a dialogue about

memory whose ideas frequently surface in subsequent aesthetics, but without being explicitly

recognised as having their source in the Phaedrus. Nietzsche and Valéry "forget" the

Phaedrus in a similar manner. § 34 of the Anthropology is entitled 'Of the Faculty for the

making Present of the Past and the Future through the Imagination', which faculty includes

prevision (§ 35) and divination (§ 36) as well as memory. Kant's concept of memory seems to

follow in part that of the Philebus, in making the same faculty responsible for anticipating the

future and remembering the past. He also distinguishes putting something in memory from

bringing that thing to conscience (§ 34A, 58), which is a similar distinction to that operating

in the Philebus between memory and recollection. But memory is simply discussed here as an

empirical faculty for arranging and preserving sensations, and does not retain any of the

sacred functions it held in Plato. However, the section on divination describes divination as

inspiration, in terms which recall the Phaedrus (in which divination was one of the forms of

3'Einer der Alten sagte: "Die Kunst zu schreiben hat das Gedächtnis zu Grunde gerichtet (zum Teil

entbehrlich gemacht)"' (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht Pt. I, § 31 A, 489. Werkausgabe. Ed.

Wilhelm Weischedel. 12 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. XII, 397-690). I have for the most

part based my version of this text on Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique (1798). Trans. and ed.

Michel Foucault. Second ed. Paris: Vrin, 1970. § 34, 59. The text employed by that translation is the

second edition of 1800. The section numbers in the Weischedel edition are different from those given

by Foucault, who follows the Akademie Ausgabe. I refer in each case to the relevant section and page

number of both German text and French translation. When discussing Derrida's reading of the

Anthropology in 'Economimesis', I have employed the translation given by Richard Klein as part of his

translation of Derrida's article, and modified it from time to time where necessary. As it is a published
 206

inspiration second to the poet's): divination 'is, or is thought to be, an inspiration whose cause

is different from nature (supernatural); this ability [to prophesise], because it seemed to arise

from the influence of a God, is also called the power of divination proper' (§ 33, 493/§ 36,

61). 4 He continues:

But how did the poets come to present themselves as inspired (or possessed) and as

diviners (vates), and how could they boast of having inspirations in their poetic fits

(furor poeticus)? One can only explain it in the following manner: the poet does not

execute, like the prose writer, at leisure, the work which is ordered from him; he must

seize the instant of a favourable disposition of the internal sense, from which will

flow, of themselves, lively and powerful images and feelings, he for his part,

meanwhile, merely adopting a passive attitude; since long ago already, one has

remarked that a certain degree of folly mingles itself with genius (§ 33, 493-494/ §

36, 62). 5

translation, I have not always included the full German text with Klein's translation, but have provided

excerpts from the original where necessary, and wherever I have modified Klein's translation.

4'Eingebung einer von der Natur unterschiedenen Ursache (übernaturlich) ist, oder dafür gehalten

wird, deren Fähigkeit, weil sie von dem Einflusse eines Gottes herzurühren scheint, auch das

eigentliche Divinationsvermögen gennant wird'.

5'Wie aber gar die Poeten dazu kämen, sich auch für begeistert (oder besessen) und für wahrsagend

(vates) zu halten, und in ihren dichterischen Anwandlungen (furor poeticus) Eingebungen zu haben

sich berühmen konnten, kann nur dadurch erklärt werden: daß der Dichter, nicht so wie der

Prosenreder, bestellte Arbeit mit Muße verfertigt, sondern den günstigen Augenblick seiner ihn

anwandelnden inneren Sinnenstimmung haschen muß, in welchem ihm lebendige und kräftige Bilder

und Gefühle von selbst zuströmen, und er hie[r]bei sich gleichsam nur leidend verhält; wie es denn

auch schon eine alte Bemerkung ist, daß dem Genie eine gewisse Dosis von Tollheit beigemischt sei'

(Latin not italicised in Weischedel or Foucault).

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The inspired one is described as passive in this passage, just as he is in Plato, and the link

between inspiration and madness which is emphasised throughout the Phaedrus is alluded to.

But Kant does not give any credit to divine inspiration here, which he discusses as a kind of

superstition: es ist schon eine alte Bemerkung means literally 'it's already an old story', and

Tollheit has a meaning closer to 'craziness' than divine madness (Tollhaus, as we shall see

below, refers to a lunatic asylum). He demystifies the popular view of inspiration with a

purely physiological explanation, as 'a favourable disposition of the internal sense'. Once

again the structure and argument of the Phaedrus are alluded to without being developed. I

shall attempt to show that the poet in third Critique is analogous to Plato's Lover in the

Phaedrus, and that the work carried out by memory in Plato is taken over in Kant by the

Imagination, 6 Genius and Taste. 7 And the divine inspiration which Kant dismisses in the

Anthropology is reinstated in the third Critique, but as having its source in Nature. I will

argue on one level that Kant's Critique does nothing but repeat the Phaedrus, but that this

repetition inevitably, according to the law of mimesis, alters the work it repeats. 8

6Cf. 'Because imagination is richer and more fruitful in representations than the senses, in cases of

passion, it is the absence rather than presence of the object which animates it, if one thing comes to

recall to the mind the representation of that object which distractions had […] erased for a time' ('Weil

die Einbildungskraft reicher und fruchtbarer an Vorstellungen ist als der Sinn, so wird sie, wenn eine

Leidenschaft hinzutritt, durch die Abwesenheit des Gegenstandes mehr belebt als durch die

Gegenwart; wenn etwas geschieht, was dessen Vorstellung, die eine Zeit lang durch Zerstreuungen

getilgt zu sein schien, wiederum ins Gemüt zurückruft') (Anthropologie § 30, 483/ § 33, 56).

7The aesthetical Taste refers for Kant to the faculty which judges all artistic products, whatever sense

they appeal to (sight, hearing etc.). I have distinguished aesthetical taste from the sense of taste by

capitalising the former, and leaving the latter uncapitalised.

8A similar point is made in 'Economimesis' 57/3. I am in effect considering Kant as a neo-Platonist.

Thanks to Prof. S. R. L. Clark, I am able to show passages from Plotinus which make similar points to

those I highlight in Kant. Peter Struck, whose paper I had the pleasure to hear at the 'Mimesis, Fifty

Years Later: the Representation of Reality in Literature' international conference held at the University
 208

Specifically, Kant's account systematises, and fills in gaps in Plato's account. But at the same

time it leaves out the tragic dimension which interrupts the aesthetic in the Phaedrus, so that

the Critique might be seen, while granting to the poet the powers reserved for the divine lover

in the Phaedrus, to simultaneously confirm the aesthetic. According to this version, the

Critique would be the epitome of a certain version of the aesthetic (Heidegger's third

moment) 9 before its Hegelian accomplishment. This applies at least to what Kant has to say

about the beautiful. Kant's writing on the sublime, however, suggests, according to two very

different readings, 10 ways in which the Critique might depart from aesthetics.

We will start by looking at how Kant fills in a particular gap in Plato's text, on the

topic of inspiration. The inspiration discussed and valorised by the Phaedrus is brought about

by an object of beauty on its beholder, whereas in the Ion, and indeed in Plato's other remarks

on inspiration, inspiration enables the poet to create objects of beauty. The account of

of Gröningen in May 1996, showed that Plotinus and other Neo-Platonists such as Proclus and Pseudo-

Dionysius saw the artist as producing a symbol which 'actually invokes the real presence of the symbol's

referent', rather than imitating material objects. He hoped to extend his discussion, in a manner not

dissimilar to my own (cf. 'Platonic Memory/Romantic Imagination.' Q/W/E/R/T/Y (forthcoming;

included in App. IV), to modern aesthetics such as those of Coleridge (cf. 'Against Mimesis:

Neoplatonism and the Birth of the "Symbol".' App. I. 19). In the discussion which followed his paper he

argued that the eikon in the Phaedrus did not make the divine present, as the sumbola did in the work of

the Neo-Platonists he was discussing. This I think is true, and puts in a nutshell what is so interesting

about the Phaedrus. What we will observe in this chapter is the manner in which Kant, like the Neo-

Platonists, makes the divine present in the art work as symbol for the supersensual in such a way as to

lose those tragic aspects of inspiration which broke from the aesthetic in Plato. By making the divine

'present' in the symbol, the Neo-Platonists and Kant aestheticise Plato.

9Nietzsche I, Ch. 13, 83-84.

10Derrida, 'Economimesis' and Lacoue-Labarthe, 'La vérité sublime'. Cf. also Jean-François Lyotard.

'L'Interet du Sublime.' Du Sublime. 149-177.

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inspiration in the Phaedrus differs from Plato's other accounts in that it examines the effect of

inspiration on the recipient of the work of art, on the lover who beholds beauty. This

distinction is also made by Nietzsche, when he criticises aesthetics for viewing art from the

point of view of the person appreciating the work, not of its creator: 'Our aesthetics hitherto

has been a woman's aesthetics to the extent that only the receivers of art have formulated

their experience of "what is beautiful?" In all philosophy hitherto the artist is lacking -'. 11 To

that extent, Plato's account of inspiration in the Phaedrus is what Nietzsche would call a

woman's aesthetics. Now, in Ion 533 d-e, the Muse, like the beloved in Phaedrus, holds an

intermediate position between the gods and men. This suggests that the inspiration which

grants the poet his creative power might be analogous to the poetry it makes possible. The

poet's inspiration would be a means of connection between the sensual and the supersensible,

just like the products of his poetical work. Poetic inspiration would follow a circular path

analogous to the soul's journey in the Phaedrus. Descending from the heavens via the Muses,

it would enable the poet to create a work of sensual art which inspired its recipient by

reminding him of the heavens, and thus drew that recipient back up toward the heavens from

which the poet's inspiration first proceeded.

But Plato's analysis of the inspiration which affects the poet - as we saw in Chapter 1

(§§ 5-6) - is vague. Specifically, it fails to articulate the part played by the poet in the writing

of poetry because it does not give him any part, making him a mere vessel for inspiration.

This view is exemplified by a passage in Laws IV, when the Athenian argues that the laws

should be more than a curt statement of the law, and include rhetorical devices such as

exemplification in order to persuade the community to follow them (718 d - 723 c). He does

so by contrasting the legislator's statement of the right way to conduct a funeral with the

poet's varied description of different types of people and the kinds of funerals they would be

inclined to hold. The Athenian argues that the legislator should use exemplification

11'The Will to Power as Art' # 811 (March-June 1888), 429. Cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche Ch. 12, 70.
 210

analogous to the poet's in order to explain his laws persuasively to the community. 12 The

poet's description includes unsuitable ways of conducting funerals because inspiration makes

him mindless, in contrast to the legislator, who knows how to use judiciously the variety he

criticises in poetry:

When a poet [ποιητησ] takes his seat on the Muse's tripod [τριποδι Μουσησ], he is

mindless [ουκ εµφρων εστιν; trans. modified]. 13 He is like a fountain [κρηνην] which

gives free course [ετοιµωσ] to the rush of its waters [ρειν], and since representation

[µιµησεωσ] is of the essence of his art [τεχνησ ουσησ], must often contradict his own

utterances in his presentations of contrasted characters, without knowing whether the

truth [αληθη] is on the side of this speaker or of that (719 c). 14

What the poet lacks, in his mindlessness, is what Kant will call Taste. The poet's

mindlessness in the Laws makes him present the variety of characters, without reference to

morality, which is of course something the poet is criticised for doing in Republic III. And, as

in the Phaedrus 245 a, it limits the poet to an external exemplification of the truth, inferior to

the lover's ability to experience the truth. Like the mirror-bearer in Republic X who just lets

light rebound from his mirror, the poet does no work: he just lets inspiration flow through

12We discussed the analogies between rhetoric and mourning in the previous chapter (§ 8), as well as

the Phaedrus's presentation of rhetoric as a means of convincing people of the truth.

13Taylor translates with 'his judgement takes leaves of him'. Phronè, however, corresponds most closely

to the English 'mind', as the place where both the physical brain and the activity of thinking are located,

and as opposed to more abstract kindred words like logos (logic, rationality), dianoia (thought,

understanding), and nous (reason). Des Places translates with 'n'est plus maitre de son ésprit' (Les Lois

III-IV. Trans. and ed. Edouard des Places. Œuvres complètes de Platon IX ii (1951)).

14Cf. also Phaedrus 235 c-d, 245 a, 265 b for similar statements.
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him like water. 15 Plato, as we saw above, valorises the lover's inspiration, but devalorises the

way writing (and mimesis) affect the subject from the outside; valorises one kind of passivity

while devalorising another. It would seem then that the poet's mindlessness makes him

produce the eidolon condemned by Plato, as opposed to the eikon of the truth beheld by the

enraptured lover. The poet's mindless passivity during creation falls on the same side of

Plato's division between good and bad passivity as do writing and mimesis. Plato praises in

the divine lover what he condemns in writing and in mimesis, but suggests at the same time

through this very comparison that divine love is a graphic mimesis. Poetic inspiration is

subject to a similar ambiguous treatment, in which it must be distinguished from divine love,

and literally ranked in second place against the lover's first. The poet's mindlessness

identifies him as a mimètes. By presenting poetic creation as a kind of irresponsible and, in

the end, mediocrely creative passivity, Plato on one level attempts to hide the analogies

between poetic inspiration and divine love (by treating the first lightly and exuberantly

praising the second), just as he attempted to hide the analogies between the written

eidolon and the divine eikon.

15Socrates underlines the similarity between these two forms of passivity when he describes divine

erotic inspiration simultaneously as a stream and as a reflection in the Phaedrus: 'the springs

[ρευµατοσ] of that stream [πηγη] which Zeus as lover of Ganymede named "desire" flow [φεροµενη

(from orein)] in abundance upon the lover, some sinking within him [εδυ (from duoh)], and some

flowing [απορρει] off outside him [εξω] as he brims over [αποµεστουµενου]; and as a breath of wind

[πνευµα] or an echo rebounds from a smooth [λειων] hard surface [στερεων ('surface' seems to be

implicit in stereohn)] and returns to the source ['source' supplied by the translator] from which it issued

[ωρµηθη (from ormaoh)], so the stream [ρευµα] of beauty passes back into its possessor through his

eyes' (255 c). The smooth hard surface from which the breath rebounds is analogous to the mirror,

especially if one considers that what the breath is being compared to is the light, which rebounds to the

eyes.
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Such concealment is made all the more important by the question of the poet's role in

his creation - of what goes on in the poet during the moment of inspiration - and of the

interaction between the divine and the human. This is of course the question which Lacoue-

Labarthe shows Heidegger avoiding in his reading of Plato. 16 And it is posed with particular

acuity by the question of poetic inspiration, because of an ambiguity in its status. Mimetic

passivity can be condemned by Plato because of its concealment of the truth (or because of

its disinstallation, in the case of Plato-Heidegger) in a fairly straightforward way. Even

though Lacoue-Labarthe shows that passivity to be constitutive of what Plato(-Heidegger)

attempts to exclude it from, the distinction retains a certain validity within Plato's premises. 17

16Cf. 'Typographie' 188-189 and 217-218.

17Without wishing to belabor the point, one could even find some justification for such distinctions

within deconstruction's premises. Thus, Derrida writes that 'there is a relative specificity, as Austin says,

a "relative purity" of performatives. But this relative purity does not emerge in opposition

to citationality or iterability, but in opposition to other kinds of iteration within a general iterability

which constitutes a violation of the allegedly rigorous purity of every event of discourse or of every

speech act' ('Signature Event Context' (1971) 18. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (1977).

Limited Inc. 1-21). Derrida is discussing J. L. Austin's opposition of performative speech acts which

accomplish what they say - for example taking an oath or making a bet (which themselves are in the

first instance opposed to referential, or to use Austin's terminology 'constative' speech acts) - to parasitic

utterances which cite performative speech acts in contexts where their usual performative significance

does not apply. The pre-eminent example of parasitic utterances used by Austin is that of an actor

speaking a performative on stage (16). This is no coincidence, because, although Derrida does not use

the word in his essay, parasitic speech acts, as described by Austin (How to do things with words.

Second ed. Oxford, Oxford UP, 1975), are analogous to the work of the mimètes as described by Plato.

Beyond the obvious similarities derived from the fact that both are "represented" by actors, parasitical

speech acts imitate performatives used in the business of everyday life, just as the mimètes imitates the

demiourgos; the parasitical speech acts in a sense pervert the performatives by making them devoid of

their usual significance. And, like mimesis, the parasitical performative pretends to be the performative
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But here we need to ask again why a contrasting valorisation of a particular form of

passivity, namely divine inspiration, takes place in the Symposium and the third speech in the

Phaedrus. The Phaedrus begins and ends with a critique of mimesis in between which lies

this uncharacteristic speech in praise of heteronomy, passivity, and imitation. The position of

the great speech on love underlines the fact that it departs from Plato's wider condemnation

of mimesis and those things which characterise it. It could be argued that this movement is as

coherent as Plato's devalorisation of mimesis: the inspired lover is a vehicle for the divine,

and his productions will be distinguished from those of the mimètes by that divinity. But

Plato can only maintain this because there is a ruse at work here, a ruse which in fact is the

same as that identified in Book X of the Republic (in which Plato discusses the product of

mimesis to draw attention away from the work of the mimètes) by Lacoue-Labarthe. And that

of which it is the parasite. The exclusion operated by Austin thus inhabits a similar conceptual space to

Plato's, notwithstanding the obvious differences between the two (Austin is not explicitly judgmental in

his exclusion of parasitical speech acts, saying that he operates it for methodological reasons, in order

to understand how non-parasitical performatives work). Derrida's point is therefore similar to Lacoue-

Labarthe's in 'Typographie': just as iterability is constitutive of both the speech acts of actors on the

stage and of the performatives they cite, so too the discourse of philosophy and of the mimetic poet are

made possible by a generalised mimesis. But within that generalised mimesis, it is possible to

distinguish philosophy from acting, and lies from the truth; mimesis is, like iterability, what would make

such a distinction possible. So although Plato's definition of the mimètes's passivity can be

deconstructed, it retains its coherence within that deconstruction, just as Austin's distinction between

relative degrees of purity in the performative retains its coherence within the iterability which makes it

possible. Méchoulan makes a similar point when he writes that '[s]emblance is not simulation: the latter

is only recognised against the background of the former. If semblance was always simulation, we would

not even be able to give the particular concept of simulation any meaning, because it would designate

the plot [trame] of all our actions, of all our words, of all our thoughts' ('Theoria, Aesthesis, Mimesis,

Doxa' 150/148).
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ruse consists of speaking about the effect of inspiration on the lover (the receiver of art, in

Nietzsche's terminology) rather than the inspiration of the creative artist. Nietzsche's woman's

aesthetics is Plato's trick. Just as Plato's praise of divine love departs from his customary

deprecation of mimesis, so too his description of erotic inspiration departs from his

customary discussion of inspiration in terms of the creating poet. Had Plato presented his

valorised inspiration as the activity of a poet, he would have presented a divine mimesis

explicitly. By deflecting attention onto the recipient of the inspired work, the analogies

between divine inspiration and mimesis are disguised. Underlying this observation is the fact

that the scandal of mimesis is that of an active passivity which complicates the question of

the subject. The mimètes is neither active nor passive: he is a subject because he acts, he is

not a subject because he is always affected by another from the outside. The valorised divine

inspiration in the second speech avoids being implicated in this scandal, because it only

speaks of the effect of inspiration on its recipient, without mentioning its active cause. 18

The passivity of the poet's inspiration must be concealed because it falls awkwardly

between mimesis and divine inspiration: it is both divine and not divine, it is both active and

passive. It is raised above mimetic poetry, but must be inferior to divine inspiration. It is to

this awkwardness which the conception of the poet as vessel points. Plato simply avoids the

18The description of the interaction between the lover and his beloved (250 e - 256 e), in which the

lover attempts to overcome his sensual desire in order to lead a "Platonic" relationship with his beloved,

describes it purely in terms of the effect of the beloved on the lover, or of the lover on the beloved (255

a - 256 b). As opposed to Plato's description of the poet as a vessel, which raises the question of what

the poet's role in his production is without giving an answer, the description of the beloved deflects

attention from the question by describing him only in terms of his effect on the lover, and passing over

in silence the question of his role in the lover's passion. Cf. the Euthyphro for an echo of this notion,

where it is said that the beloved is beloved because of the love the lover feels for him, not because of

anything essential in him (10 b-c).

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question of the poet's role in his poetry. The blankness of the poet's mind during the moment

of inspiration corresponds to the necessary blankness of Plato on the question of his

creativity. This blankness also responds to the necessity, in Plato's text, of concealing the

analogies between the poet and the lover's inspiration, in order to keep divine inspiration

uncontaminated by the problems which the poet's mimetic activity create. The problematic

nature of such a concealment is developed in Plato's treatment of the Muses. Plato is

consistent in saying that the Muses are the source for the poet's inspiration, by contrast with

the source of the inspiration brought about by divine love, which is the supersensual.

Kant's account of the poet's inspiration describes Nature as its source, and what I

shall try to argue in relation to him is that his account of Nature is a development of Plato's

scattered remarks concerning the Muses, and that this development enables him to fill in the

gaps left in Plato's analysis of inspiration. The distinction between the sources of the poet's

and the lover's inspiration might seem specious at first, because the Muses are supernatural

beings - not quite gods, but superior to human beings. It could be assumed then that the poet's

inspiration also comes from the heavens, but via the Muses. The Muses would accordingly

merely constitute an ornamental relay between the divine and the human, an inessential

"poetic" adornment to Plato's system.

But this would be to simplify Plato's differentiated and even at times contradictory

account. In several places in his work, Plato does indeed give a broadly positive account of

the Muses, which tallies with the view of the Muses as a relay between the poet and the

heavens, and might be consonant with the notion, outlined earlier, of poetic inspiration as the

counterpart in the poet to divine love. 19 This possibility is raised in the Thaetetus, in the

19Diotima in the Symposium argues, in quite a conventional way, that the fine arts were founded by the

Muses because of the demi-god Love, along, it must be said, with all other achievements of value (197

b). This suggests, albeit not convincingly, that the Muses are regarded here as the counterpart in the
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much discussed passage in which Socrates asks how it is that one can 'become acquainted

with something one did not know before?' (191 c). Socrates imagines that our brains contain a

block of wax:

Let us call it the gift [δωρον] of the Muses' mother, Mnemosyne

[µουσων µετροσ µνηµοσυνησ], 20 and say that whenever we wish to remember

[µνηµονευσαι] something [which] we […] conceive in our own minds, we hold this

wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint them [αποτυπουσθαι] on it as we

poet to erotic inspiration. Other places in Plato's text also suggest similar possibilities for the Muses: the

name of the Muses and of music is derived in the Cratylus from 'µωσθαι', which means 'making

philosophic inquiries' (406 a), mention is made of a philosophical Muse (Sophist 259 e), and the muses'

gift of music to mankind is praised in Epinomis 991 b. Trans. A. E. Taylor (1956). Collected

Dialogues. 1517-1533.

20Trans. modified. Cornford translates mnèmosunès with 'memory', but the text actually refers to the

goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. All of the other translations of this dialogue into English translate

mnèmosunès as memory (as did the translator of Pausanias's Boeotia, see above): Thaetetus. Trans.

Robin Anthony Herschel Waterfield. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987; Thaetetus. Trans. John

McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973; The Thaetetus of Plato. Trans. M. J. Levett (1928) rev. Myles

Burnyeat. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1990. Diès translates accurately with 'de la mère des

Muses, Mnémosyne' (Théétète. Trans. and ed. Auguste Diès. Œuvres complètes de Platon VIII (1924)).

The belief that Mnemosyne was the Muses' mother seems to derive from the Theogony of Hesiod (est.

viii bc): The Muses, he writes, 'were born in Pieria, to Memory [µνηµοσυνη], queen of the foothills of

Eleutherae [Ελευθηροσ ('freedom')], in union with their father, the son of Kronos; oblivion of ills and

respite from cares' (Hesiod. Theogony. Ed. M. C. West. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966. 50-60/ Theogony.

Theogony & Works and Days. Trans. and ed. M. C. West. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988). All references to

Hesiod are to line number only. Cf. also Pausanias. Attica xi, § 5. Descriptions of Greece I (1918) Bk.

1. (1-243), Arcadia xlvii § 3. Descriptions of Greece IV (1935) Bk. 8 (1-169), and Boeotia xxix, §§ 2-

3, and Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs. Paris: Maspero, 1965. Ch. 2, 90-91.
 217

might stamp [ενσηµαινοµενουσ] the impression of a seal ring [δακτυλιων σηµεια].

Whatever is so imprinted [εκµαγη] we remember [µνηµονευειν] and know so long as

the image [ειδωλον] remains; whatever is rubbed out [εξαλειφθη] or has not

succeeded in leaving an impression [εκµαγηναι] we have forgotten and do not

know. 21

Memory works like the myths in Book II of the Republic: it makes an imprint on the mind's

wax, just as the stories contain models (tupoi) which are imprinted on the child's personality.

The Muses' mother makes possible then, a process which is analogous to what Plato criticises

in mimesis, except that (as Derrida shows) it is presented in a positive light in the Thaetetus,

according to a movement of valorisation/devalorisation with which we are by now familiar.

But Mnemosyne is also the goddess of the very memory which makes divine inspiration

possible in the Phaedrus. As the daughter of memory, the Muse is therefore described as

occupying the position suggested earlier on, of a mediator between the divine and the

21Thaetetus 191 d. Trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford (1935), with an interpolation from the

translation of Benjamin Jowett (1871). Collected Dialogues. 847-919. Jacques Derrida opposes the

praise, in the Thaetetus, of memory as an imprint which responds to the internal movements of the

mind, to the condemnation of writing in the Phaedrus as something which reminds from the outside ('La

pharmacie de Platon' 119/104). Like all such conceptualisations of memory, it resonates with many

subsequent texts, none more so than Freud's 'A Note upon the "Mystic Writing-Pad"' (1925). Trans.

James Strachey (1940). SE XIX (1961), 227-232. Cf. Lissa Paul’s somewhat superficial essay

'Intimations of Imitations: Mimesis, Fractal Geometry and Children's Literature.' Literature for

Children: Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Peter Hunt. London: Routledge, 1992. 66-80. Compare also the

moment when, including himself among the poets, Zarathustra takes Plato's characterisation over for his

own account, and writes that there is something eternally feminine in the poets ('us') which makes them

interested in the tales old wives tell each other at night (Nietzsche. 'Von den Dichtern/Des poètes'

274/275. Also Sprach Zarathustra/Ainsi Parlait Zarathustra (1883-1885). Bilingual ed. Trans.

Geneviève Blanquis. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1969. II (1883), 273-277).

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sensual. This passage suggests the possibilities for the Muses which we are examining, but at

the same time debases them by associating them with the gesture of mimesis criticised in the

Republic and elsewhere.

A more detailed description of the Muses which portrays them in a similar light

comes in the Phaedrus, in a pause in the discussion of rhetoric, when Socrates and Phaedrus

have agreed that making speeches is not a shameful or praiseworthy activity in itself, and are

about to investigate under what conditions a speech is written in a shameful or praiseworthy

way (257 e - 258 e). Socrates, noticing that it is midday, urges Phaedrus to carry on with the

conversation, instead of having a nap, because the cicadas are watching, and will see that he

and Socrates have resisted their soporific spell: 'if they see us talking and sailing past them

unbewitched [ακηλητουσ] by their siren song, perhaps they may respect [αγασθεντεσ] 22 us,

and give us that gift [γερασ] 23 which they have from the gods to give to men

[παρα ανθρωποισ διδοναι]' (259 a-b). 24 We are confronted again with the Gift, and it is a gift

which comes from the gods via the cicadas. The cicadas' gift is analogous to the gift of divine

madness, and their position, as a relay between gods and men, is analogous to the position

which we potentially gave to the Muses. Socrates explains the Muses' gift:

22From agalma, the word used by Socrates to describe the statues to which he compares the beloved.

23Lydell and Scott define geras as 1. a gift of honor, a privilege, and 2. generally a gift or a present, i.e.

as having a performance very similar to charis and doron. Sense 1. of geras is opposed to 'moira' sense

II (part, portion or share which falls to one, distribution of booty (cf. Odyssey II. 543) inheritance or

fate) by Lydell and Scott, presumably because geras is an exceptional gift, whereas moira refers to a

gift which is merely one's due. Cf. in that connection the description of madness as 'a fine thing, when it

comes by divine dispensation [θεια µοιρα]' (Phaedrus 244 c), in which moira has a meaning very close

to that of geras.

24Cf. Hesiod, Theogony 93-97.

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These cicadas were men before the Muses were born, and […] with the birth of

Muses and the appearance of song [ωδησ] some men were so unhinged [εξεπλαγησω]

by pleasure, that in their singing [αδοντεσ] they neglected to eat and drink, and failed

to notice that they died; from them the race of cicadas was afterwards born, with this

gift [γερασ] from the Muses, that from their birth they have no need of sustenance,

but immediately sing, without food or drink, until they die, and after that go and

report to the Muses which among those here honours which of them (259 b-c).

The word for unhinged, exeplagèsan, comes from the same family as ekplagènai, which we

saw Socrates use to describe the inspiration caused in him by Phaedrus reading Lysias's

speech (234 d). The Muses are responsible for inspiring men, specifically here through their

songs (ohdès, from which we derive our odes). This word does not describe the song in its

limited sense, but the lyric more generally, and includes lyric poetry too. 25 The proximity of

the Muses to the heavens (and by implication of the poet's to the lover's inspiration), is

reinforced by their interchangeabilitybility: in 259 b, the cicadas have their gift from the

gods, in 259 c they derive the same gift from the Muses. Socrates lists, after the Muses of

dance and of love, two Muses to whom the cicadas 'announce those who spend their time in

philosophy and honour the music [µουσικην] which belongs to them - who most of all the

Muses have as their sphere both the heavens and talk, both divine and human' (259 d). This

echoes the hierarchy of trades announced earlier by Socrates, in which he gave first place to

one who is a 'lover of wisdom or of beauty, or devoted to the Muses [µουσικου] and to love'

(248 d). The ambiguous 'mousikou' could refer both to a devotee of music (a "muso" as we

say today), and a devotee of the Muses. In both these remarks, music, the Muses and

philosophy are mentioned in the same breath, putting the Muses on the same level as erotic

25Thus, in his characterisation of the Muses' inspiration (in contrast to the seer's, the mystic's and the

lover's) Socrates says that the Muses arouse 'a Bacchic frenzy of expression in lyric [ωδασ] and other

forms of poetry' (245 a).

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and philosophical inspiration. This seems at first like one of Plato's frequent inconsistencies:

in one place he says that poetic inspiration from the Muses is inferior to the philosophical and

erotic, in others he ranks the Muses and music as equivalent to philosophy. We can give more

credit to Plato's work if we understand that the "inconsistency" results from the contradiction

in Plato's view of inspiration which we have just analysed. The text grants the Muses and

music an elevated place, from which the Muses mediate between the poet and the divine

through song; the lover is inspired by the heavens via the beloved, the poet via the Muses

and music. 26

But the muse's gift seems also to be associated with poet's devalorised mimetic

productions, because it is mentioned in order to encourage a discussion of rhetoric. We can

pursue this possibility by asking what the gift of the cicadas to men actually is. The gift

which the cicadas receive is the privilege of singing till their death and then reporting to the

Muses. Does Socrates mean that the cicadas will give the gift of song to him and to Phaedrus,

allow them to report to the Muses, or perhaps report favourably to the Muses on their behalf?

All three are possible, but a later statement, in which the gift of the Muses is mentioned once

more in connection with rhetoric lets us decide. Socrates is discussing how someone can be

mislead by semblances which are different from the truth, in other words by the feature of

mimesis condemned in the Republic:

The two speeches which were given do have in them an example of how someone

who knows the truth can mislead the audience by making play [προσπαιζων] with

what he says. I myself, Phaedrus, blame the gods of the place [εντοπιουσ θεοω]; and

perhaps too the interpreters of the Muses who sing [ωδοι] over our heads may have

26Lydell and Scott give as the first definition of mousikè 'any art over which the Muses presided, esp.

music or lyrical poetry', citing Symposium 196 e and 205 c as examples.

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breathed [επιπνευκοτεσ] this gift [γερασ] upon us - for I don't think I share in any

science [τεχνησ] of speaking (262 d).

What the cicadas blow onto Socrates is a gift, just like inspiration. Given the use of breath to

symbolise the soul (the spirit bloweth wheresoever it will), and the description of divine love

as a breath of wind blown onto the beloved by the lover (255 c; cf. above n), one can clearly

see that by breathing a gift onto Socrates, the cicadas have inspired him. Like inspiration, the

cicadas' gift comes from the outside in order to give its recipient powers he does not

ordinarily possess. The cicadas' gift is inspiration, but it is also rhetoric and mimesis: it gives

Socrates the science of speaking he did not have before, by which one deceives by making

play. 27 This devalorising gesture corresponds to Plato's habitual description of the Muses as

responsible for the more limited functions of poetry and music as forms of moral

instruction. 28 It would seem then that the discussion of the Muses in this passage blurs the

distinctions between divine inspiration and mimesis. As in the passage from the Thaetetus,

but in a more elaborate way, the Muses and music are on one hand elevated to the divine love

superior to poetry, and, on the other, associated with the mimetic production over which

divine love is elevated. The Muses conflate the mimetic and divinely inspired poets which the

Phaedrus compares and attempts to distinguish from one another, and point toward a concept

of the poet which undoes Plato's distinction between the active and the passive. This will

have implications for Kant, who perfunctorily dismisses music as the most sensual of all

27Cf. also where Socrates mockingly describes the rhetorician Polus as having 'enshrined

[µουσεια λογων (made into sacred/musaeical sayings)] - terms like "speaking with reduplication"' (267

b).

28Plato explicitly makes the Muses responsible for the more limited functions of poetry and music as

forms of moral instruction, referring to the 'educative/playful' function of the muses (Laws II 656). Plato

is at times even scornful of the muses (Republic II 364 e). Cf. also Laws II 653 d, 654 a, 665 a 672 d,

VI 775 b, 783 a and Timaeus 47 d.

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forms of art, and for Nietzsche and the French Symbolists, who both make music the

inspiration for poetry.

The contradictory presentation of poetic inspiration in Plato's description of the

Muses is necessarily carried over into his discussion of music. Plato frequently refers to

music and to poetry as if they were the same thing, 29 and gives music the same limited role

he gives to poetry. 30 But there are two moments, presented as uncharacteristic by Plato's text

itself, in which music is granted a more elevated position. The drunken Alcibiades, whose

outburst against/in praise of Socrates is "out of order," in a famous passage describes

Socrates's philosophy as bewitching like the satyr Marsyas's pipes (Symposium 215 b sq.). 31

29Cf. Laws II 658 b, 660 a-b, VII 834 e, Republic II 376 e. When in the Laws III poets are blamed for

the perversion of music, they are blamed for perverting their own art (700 a - 701 a).

30For Plato, music's function is primarily educational: it represents and induces harmonious feelings

which are conducive to just behaviour, and acts as a pleasant inducement to morality (Cf. Laws II 655 a

sq., III 701 b, VII 798 sq., VIII 828 c, XII 947 e sq. Protagoras 326 a sq., Timaeus 18, 47 c,

Republic III 398 b, 401 a sq., IV 424 d sq., Laches 188d, Epinomis 978 a). Music is also described as a

disguise for sophistry (Protagoras 316 e), and, when it fails in its educational and moral role is

criticised along the same lines as the poet/sophist. It is described when so criticised as a knack

(Philebus 56 a, Thaetetus 206 a, Laws VII 812 d, Sophist 253 b, Republic VII 522 a), as a source of

empirical gratification (Gorgias 502 a, Greater Hippias 298 e), and as imitation (Cratylus 423 d sq.,

Laws II 655 d sq., 668 a sq.., VII 798 sq., 812 c, Epinomis 975 d). Music is also used as a didactic

example to illustrate difficult concepts (Philebus 26 a, Phaedo 73 d, Sophist 253 b). Other incidental

references to music may be found at Hippias Major 295 d, Symposium 187 a-e, Charmides 160 a,

Protagoras 312 b, Republic V 452 a.

31Derrida comments on this passage (as does Lacan), in which Alcibiades accuses Socrates of

bewitching him (pharmattein), in other words of using the pharmakon which is condemned in the

Phaedrus, and draws attention to the resemblances between Socrates and Diotima's portrait of Eros.
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Phaedo recounts how Socrates took to music shortly before his death, saying 'In the course of

my life I have often had the same dream [ενυπνιον], […] always saying the same thing

"Socrates, practice and cultivate the arts [µουσικην ποιει και εργαζου]'32 (Phaedo 60 d). He

therefore tries his hand at writing the popular kind of music [την δηµωδην µουσικην ποιειν],

so as not to offend the god. Without mentioning the Phaedrus, Nietzsche, in a detailed

reading of the passage from which we have just quoted, identifies the dream as the

supernatural experience of which Socrates's realisation in the Phaedrus that he might have

offended the god of love is also an example:

For with respect to art that despotic logician [Socrates] had the feeling of a gap, a

void, half a reproach, a possibly neglected duty. As he tells his friends in prison,

there often came to him one and the same dream apparition, which always said the

same thing to him: 'Socrates, practice music.' Up to his very last days he comforts

himself with the view that his philosophizing is the highest of the muses, and he finds

it hard to believe that a deity should remind him of the 'common, popular music.'

Finally, […] in order that he may thoroughly unburden his conscience, he does

consent to practise this music for which he has but little respect. […] It was

something akin to the demonic warning voice [my emphasis] that urged him to these

practices; it was his Apollinian 33 insight that, like a barbaric king, he did not

understand the noble image of a god and was in danger of sinning against a deity

The proximity of Socrates to music betrays the proximity of his philosophy to mimesis ('La pharmacie

de Platon' 134-135/117-118).

32Tredennick reads mousikèn as referring to the liberal arts, a translation which is supported by Greek

usage, including Plato's as we have seen. But Nietzsche, as we shall see below, renders it as music,

bringing to the fore the special place enjoyed already by music in Plato's text, and its (hidden) affinity

with divine love.

33I have followed Kaufmann's use of 'Apollinian' rather than 'Apollonian' throughout this thesis.
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[my emphasis] - through his lack of understanding. The voice of the Socratic dream

vision is the only sign of any misgivings about the limits of logic: Perhaps - thus he

may have asked himself - […] there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is

exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement to science?

(The Birth of Tragedy § 14, 92-93). 34

Nietzsche recognises that there is a gap in Plato's writing where music should be, and, as we

saw, that gap hides the problem which Plato has with poetic inspiration. Socrates's experience

in prison as described by Nietzsche is analogous to those feelings experienced by Socrates in

the Phaedrus when he realises his blasphemy. Plato even makes this realisation take place in

the Phaedrus when Socrates has exiled himself from the realm of logic, and the argument

which is developed by Socrates in his recantation is (up to a point, as we saw above), that

love is a necessary correlative and supplement to science. The voice of the Socratic dream

vision in the Phaedo is not the only instance of Socrates's misgivings about the limits of

logic: Nietzsche does not seem to credit its admonishment of Socrates in the Phaedrus, a

dialogue which looms large as a gap in Nietzsche's own writing. In that dialogue, Plato

explicitly raises the possibilities for the Muses as the inspiration for poetry, which would

enable it to create works which would inspire like a divine beloved, and presents music as a

divine art, on a par with philosophy. 35 As we saw, he also conceals this thread of argument.

34Cf. also § 15, 98.

35We find this reflected, quite bluntly, in the fact that Plato uses musical vocabulary to describe the

"harmonious" relationship between the divine and the human: the gods move in the heavens in a divine

chorus [θεον χορον] (247 a), when the soul was in the heavens, it was 'with a happy company

[ευδαιµονι χορω ('a happy chorus')]' (250 b), the just models himself on the god 'in whose chorus

[χορευτησ] he was' whilst in the heavens (252 b), and those who follow Apollo do so by 'imitating the

god himself and […] disciplining [ρυθµιζοντεσ ( from ruthmos, rhythm)] their beloved' (253 b).

Socrates uses the musician as the third example of scientific knowledge (technè), as opposed to opinion,
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We have now touched upon two themes which are the object of Philippe Lacoue-

Labarthe's Musica Ficta, namely the treatment of music by philosophy, and its rivalry with

poetry. The book is composed of four essays, the first two are on the French poets Baudelaire

and Mallarmé, the second two on the German philosophers Heidegger and Adorno. 36 The

essay of most relevance to us here is that on Heidegger. 37 Lacoue-Labarthe remarks that

between Plato's expulsion of music along with poetry in Republic III (with the exception of

military music) 38 and Nietzsche's glorification of music in the Birth of Tragedy, philosophy

seems to have ignored music, and regarded it as emotional or pure aesthetic affectivity. But,

'as irritating annoyance or pathos, 39 music has barely had any luck with philosophy, and one

could easily suspect […] that it is a question of the rebel object par excellence, rebelling

against philosophy's takeover [sic] [prise philosophique] and perhaps, for this reason,

continuously […] indicating a limit to philosophy' (Musica Ficta 166/86). Philosophy's

casual view of music as an unproblematically affective art betrays a recognition of it as

something which might undo the aesthetic. Lacoue-Labarthe focuses on Heidegger's

discussion of Wagner as the fifth moment in the history of aesthetics in Nietzsche 40 (Musica

and compares himself to the musician, as knowing philosophy in the same way as the musician knows

the science of music (269 a). Plotinus opens his discussion of how we may contemplate the intelligence

of the intelligible world by comparing a sculpted stone to a rough one [αρρυθµιστου] (On Intellectual

Beauty 1, 5-10; cf. also Of the Difficulties of the Soul (I) 12, 20-30).

36In our chapter on Valéry, we will examine Baudelaire and Mallarmé as developing Kant's

reinterpretation of Plato in a similar formalist context to that of Valéry.

37The essay on Adorno takes issue with his reading of Schönberg's Moses and Aaron, arguing that it is

a sublime work of art which interrupts aesthetics.

38Cf. Musica Ficta 166/86.

39Lacoue-Labarthe's use of the word in its limited sense is significant here.

40I, Ch. 13, 85-91.

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Ficta 186-205/98-109). Heidegger, argues Lacoue-Labarthe, subscribes without reserve to

Nietzsche's condemnation of Wagner (198/105, 205/109). He grants that Wagner attempts to

revive great art or the Gesamtkunstwerk after Hegel announces its end, but indicts him for

failing to do so (186-190/98-100). Wagner is aesthetics, not Dichtung. This attempt was also

Heidegger's, who looks to a renewal of technè and poïesis in their pre-Socratic sense, as the

clearing in which Being reveals itself to a community (Gemeinschaft).

Heidegger, you will remember, writes in his commentary on Plato in Nietzsche,

that 'the basic modes of behaviour that sustain and define the community must be grounded in

essential knowledge' (Ch. 21, 166). In other words, understanding art outside of the aesthetic

is essential to man's being-in-community: 'what stands to decision is whether we know what

art and the artwork can and must be in our historial existence: an original jump, and then a

leap [ein Ursprung und dann ein Vorsprung - or a simple accompaniment and also a simple

subsequent addition. [¶] This knowing or not knowing in part decides as to who we are.'41

The 'we' in 'who we are' refers, as the commonplace (and up to a point accurate) suspicion of

Heidegger would suggest, to the German people. Specifically, it is the destiny of the German

people to accomplish the thinking of Being of the pre-Socratics. In rethinking the essence of

art, the German people repeat the gesture of the Greeks at the height of their civilisation

(184/96). Hölderlin is the exemplary figure of such a movement for Heidegger, and what

Lacoue-Labarthe says of his gesture is true of that attempted by Heidegger: 'One needed, for

41Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art' 56; quoted in Musica Ficta 184/96. Trans. heavily

modified. The original reads, after the colon: 'un saut originel, et alors un sursaut (ein Ursprung und

dann ein Vorsprung) - ou bien un simple accompagnement, et aussi un simple ajout après coup'.

McCarren translates this with 'what stands to decision is whether we know what art and the artwork […]

must be in our historical existence: an origin [Ursprung] and thus a leap forward [Vorsprung] - or

rather something that is any longer [sic] just carried along and thus a mere addendum'. Heidegger may

be oracular at times, but he is quite incapable of writing gibberish.

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Hölderlin, to make Greek art say what it had not said, not according to the mode of a kind of

hermeneutic aiming at the implicit [content] of its discourse, but according to quite another

mode - for which I really have the impression that we are lacking a category - by which one

attempted to make [Greek art] say, what was said (but) as what was not said: the same thing,

then, in difference. [quoting Heraclitus] "En diapheron héauto"' ('La césure du spéculatif' 53-

54). 42 In other words, the understanding of the essence of art requires a mimetic relationship

to the pre-Socratics; Lacoue-Labarthe points out on the same page the similarity between

Hölderlin's remark and Aristotle's Physics 199a, in which technè imitates nature and brings it

to its telos, in other words relates to nature in the same way as the modern Germans to the

pre-Socratics.

We must remember that this revival was seen (by Wagner at the time but also

subsequently by Heidegger) as a revival of Greek tragedy (cf. Musica Ficta 14/xviii). At the

same time, by attempting to revive the Gesamtkunstwerk in his operas, Wagner,

unconsciously, responds to the destiny of the German people (101). The German people's

originality is their revival of the Greeks: 'one must […] repeat what is most Greek in the

Greeks. Begin the Greeks again. That is to say no longer be Greek at all' (La césure du

spéculatif' 55). 43 Nietzsche's critique of Wagner does not just involve aesthetics in its limited

sense for Heidegger: what is at stake is the destiny of the German people. Heidegger,

42'Il fallait, pour Hölderlin, faire dire à l'art grec ce qu'il n'avait pas dit, non pas sur le mode d'une sorte

d'herméneutique visant l'implicite de son discours, mais sur un autre mode - pour lequel j'ai bien

l'impression qu'il nous manque une catégorie - par où il s'agissait de faire dire, tout simplement, ce qui

était dit (mais) comme ce qui n'était pas dit: la meme chose, donc, en différence. "En diapheron

héauto".' The category we are missing, one could venture, is not very different from what is aimed at

Heidegger's Auseinandersetzung, or by deconstruction.

43'Il faut […] répéter ce qu'il y a de plus grec chez les Grecs. Recommencer les Grecs. C'est-à-dire ne

plus etre grec du tout.'

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following Nietzsche, criticises Wagnerian opera for remaining within the aesthetic: 'What is

wanted [by Wagner] is the domination of art as music, and thereby the domination of the pure

state of feeling' (Nietzsche Ch. 13, 86). Heidegger describes Wagner as epitomising music as

purely affective. What is lacking is rhythm and style, two words which for Heidegger, in his

confrontation with Nietzsche, describe technè and poïesis. Style and rhythm both require

restraint, shape and limits, in other words, the Gestalt. Heidegger thus subscribes to

Nietzsche's opposition between the Dionysian and the Apollinian, albeit as revised in the

light of Hölderlin's pronouncements on the subject: 44 Wagner's art is an art of Dionysian

rapture, which lacks Apollinian Gestaltung (187-200/99-106). Heidegger's reading of

Nietzsche

Is also a question of tearing Nietzsche away from the Nazi interpretation […]. That is

to say, […] from biologism (racist pseudo-biology) and from axiologism (axiomatic

reasoning) - the two seats of national socialist "philosophy" - and, beyond, from a

bad […] "romantic" overdetermination: that of Wagnerism, which in reality harbors,

because it contains it in germ, everything that burdens national socialism and keeps it

from being at the level of the task, or historial mission (90).

Wagner leads to the national aestheticism, which is a barbaric betrayal of the task Heidegger

had hoped Nazism would achieve, namely the recommencement of the Greeks. Closer

examination of what Heidegger criticises in Wagner and music shows it to be similar to what

we have shown to be the essence of inspiration and the Muses in Plato:

What Heidegger fundamentally subscribes to, in fact, is this: that an art founded on

music (on the orchestra), that is to say, an art founded on the aesthetic apprehension

of art and, in the last resort, conceived and organized from the viewpoint of an

44Cf. Nietzsche Ch. 14, 103-104.

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exclusive regard for affect, is an art that aims only for effect or impression […], and

that is based only on its reception, or implies in its principle only a call to a pure

passivity (Musica Ficta 198/105; trans. modified).

What Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis shows is that, de facto, Heidegger condemns the Muses

which Plato makes implicitly responsible for inspiration. 45 While sympathetic to his

privileging of style and law over the hysteria of national-aestheticism, we will try to show

how the Muses may be thought outside of the aesthetic to which Heidegger condemns it.

2. Vomit

Lacoue-Labarthe writes that the rare philosophers who discuss music did so 'in an obscure or

borrowed manner, without knowing too well what to say or what do with music, or where

exactly to situate it (Kant illustrates this difficulty fairly well)' (Musica Ficta 165/86).

Lacoue-Labarthe's judgement of Kant's analysis of music as adding nothing to Plato's

expulsion is accompanied by an elliptic remark in which he presents the two as identical:

'The question has been, since Plato, that is to say, since Kant and the modern opening of the

debate over Platonism: does art still - or can it still - give its essential direction and

configuration to the being-in-community'? (173/90). Lacoue-Labarthe presents Kant, on one

level, as a kind of neo-Platonist. And as such, his writing on music merely repeats Plato's

expulsion in an unoriginal way. Without wishing to present Kant's view of music as radical, I

want to show that it has affinities with the disgusting (Ekel). The disgusting is that which

Kant considers to be impossible to represent without destroying aesthetical satisfaction: 'For

in that strange sensation, which rests on nothing but imagination, the object is presented as if

it insisted, as it were, on our enjoying it even though that is just what we are forcefully

45Lacoue-Labarthe also underlines the analogies between this concept of music and Plato's concept of

mimesis, as well as the feminisation which accompanies music's "passification" (105-106).

 230

resisting; and hence the artistic presentation of the object is no longer distinguished in our

sensation from the nature of the object itself, so that it cannot possibly be considered be

considered beautiful.'46

Derrida takes this remark as the starting point for the conclusion to his difficult and

aphoristic analysis of Kant's aesthetic in 'Economimesis' (87-93/20-25). As we shall see

below, the Critique grants poetry the ability to give an idealised representation, which one

can enjoy without enjoying it sensually: it makes it possible to 'consume() what [one] does

not consume' (87/20), like memory in the Phaedrus. Derrida asks whether there is anything

which cannot be idealised by the word, which cannot be included in Kant's all-encompassing

system. The answer cannot be the ugly, which as we saw can be represented, or the sublime,

whose negativity can be reappropriated by reason. 47 Disgust, however, is unrepresentable for

Kant, Derrida argues, because it forces us to enjoy it, and in so doing abolishes the idealising

distance between the represented object and its representation, on which Taste is founded

(22/90). In order to prove that the opposition of the disgusting to Taste (in Latin, gustus),

which he finds in Kant, is not a mere tautology, 48 Derrida reads the pronouncement on the

46Kant. Critique of Judgement (1790). Trans. and ed. Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. § 48

Ak. 312; citations in German taken from Kritik der Urteilskraft. Werkausgabe. Ed. Wilhelm

Weischedel. 12 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. X. The text of Pluhar's translation is based

on the second edition of 1793. Reference also made to Kant's Critique of Judgement. Trans. J. H.

Bernard (1892). Second ed. London: Macmillan, 1914. I refer throughout to Pluhar's translation by

section number and Akademie edition page number (Ak.) only (the Akademie edition page numbers are

placed in the margin of Pluhar's edition). References to Bernard's translation are to section and page

number.

47On this point, Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe are in disagreement, as we shall see later in this chapter.

48The tautology is more apparent in French: 'le dégout est l'opposé du gout' (taste is the opposite of

distaste/disgust. Cf. 'Economimesis' 90/23.

 231

disgusting in § 48 of the Critique in connection with the analysis of the disgusting and its

relation to smell and taste (uncapitalised) in Kant's Anthropology. There, in distinguishing the

external and mechanical senses of sight, hearing and touch, from the internal and chemical

senses of taste and smell, Kant defines disgust as that which makes one want to vomit:

The former are the senses of perception (superficial), the latter of enjoyment

[Genusses] (the most interior ingestion). That is why disgust [Ekel], the excitation to

rid oneself of [entledigen] (to vomit [sich zu erbrechen]) what one has consumed

[which one has enjoyed: Genossen] by the shortest way through the alimentary canal,

has been offered to man as such a powerful vital impression. 49

49'Jene sind Sinne der Wahrnehmung (oberflächlich), diese des Genusses (innigste Einnehmung). -

Daher kommt es, daß der Ekel, eine Anreiz, sich des Genossenen durch den kürzesten Weg des

Speisekanals zu entledigen (sich zu erbrechen), als eine starke Vitalempfindung den Menschen

beigegeben worden' (Anthropologie § 19, 451/§ 21, 40; cited by Derrida with revised translation in

'Economimesis' 91-92). My translation is based on the revision of Foucault's translation by Derrida in

'Economimesis', which consistently translates derivatives of 'Genuss' with 'jouissance' (a Lacanian

concept of course), where Foucault gives 'délectation' and 'plaisir'; Foucault translates 'Genossen' as

'absorbé' rather than 'consommé', and does not draw attention to its radical meaning of 'enjoyed'.

Richard Klein's translation of this passage as part of his translation of 'Economimesis' has given a more

readable English version than mine, at the cost of a certain liberty with the original (for example, he

carelessly translates 'Einnehmung' [Kant], translated as 'ingestion' by Derrida and 'absorption' by

Foucault, with 'sensation'). There is an important difference in our rendering of 'jouissance [Genuss]',

which Klein translates as 'pleasure' in this passage. However, in his translation of the paragraph in

which Derrida comments on Kant's distinction between the Lust and Genuss, he translates Genuss as

'enjoyment': 'the agreeable arts […] have enjoyment [jouissance, Genuss] as their aim. The Fine Arts

seek pleasure [Lust [le plaisir]] without enjoyment' (66/8). Kant defines enjoyment as sensual, and

inferior to pleasure, which is the province of the liberal arts. Klein's confusion comes from Kant's

division of the aesthetic arts into 'pleasant or beautiful' arts, and his definition of 'pleasant arts' as 'those
 232

Disgust is what makes you want to vomit what you enjoyed. In the following paragraph of §

21, Kant speaks of a spiritual disgust, which is caused by a spiritual enjoyment which one

gets rid of (vomits) because it is forced on us against our will. Vomiting is the response to the

cancellation of representative distance.

But there is something more disgusting than disgust for Kant, argues Derrida. The

system of taste erected by Kant seeks to maintain the disgusting in its tautological position as

the negative of Taste, from where it can be dialectically reappropriated by that system:

disgust, as the negative of taste, is the outside of the system of taste which that system can

nevertheless conceive of as its negative, and master it by its ability to conceive of it (92/25).

Disgust is not the symmetrical inverse of taste, the proper negative of the system, 50

except in so far as some interest sustains its excellence […] and prohibits the

substitution of any non-oral analogue. The system therefore is interested in

determining the other as its other, that is, as literally disgusting.

arts that are directed merely towards enjoyment' (§ 44, 186; I refer to Bernard's translation as it is the

one used by Klein for his translation). But 'pleasant arts' translates 'angenehme Künste' (pleasant or

agreeable arts), and has nothing to do with 'Lust'. The arts of Genuss are not pleasant in the sense of

having to do with pleasure (Lust); they are pleasant (angenehm), not pleasing (Lustvoll). This is made

clear by Kant himself at the end of the section: 'The universal communicability of a pleasure [Lust]

carries with it the very concept that the pleasure is not one of enjoyment [nicht einer Lust des

Genusses]' (§ 43, 187). We have restored consistency to the argument in which Anthropology § 19/21 is

cited by translating Genuss as 'enjoyment' throughout.

50Trans. altered. Klein translates 'le propre négatif du système' with 'the negative key to the system', for

reasons I cannot fathom.

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What is absolutely foreclosed is not vomit, but the possibility of a

vicariousness of vomit, of its replacement by anything else - by some other

unrepresentable [etc.] other which forces enjoyment and whose irrepressible violence

would undo the hierarchizing authority of logocentric analogy - its power of

identification (25/92).

The vicarious substitute for the disgusting is smell, which disgusts in a non-oral way. Kant

discusses smell in the paragraph following that on spiritual disgust in the Anthropology ª

§ 19/ 21, to show that it forces itself on the subject against his will more effectively than

taste: 'Smell is a kind of taste at a distance, and others are forced to share in the enjoyment

[mit zu geniessen] whether they want to or not. Consequently, by interfering with individual

freedom, smell is less sociable than taste […] Filth seems to awake disgust [Ekel] less

through what is repulsive to the eye and tongue than through the stench associated with it' (§

19, 451/§ 21, 40). 51 Smell is described as 'vicariousness of vomit' (of disgust), because it can

be substituted for the orally disgusting. As such, it is more disgusting than the absolutely

disgusting which Kant's system defines as its negative. Derrida argues that smell could only

be recuperated for Kant's system if it was identifiable and representable: 'Vicariousness

would in turn be reassuring only if it substituted an identifiable term for an unrepresentable

one, if it allowed one to step aside from the abyss […]. But for that it would have to be itself

and represent itself as such. Whereas it is starting from that impossibility that economimesis

is constrained in its process' (92-93/25). But why should smell not represent itself? After all,

the defining feature of the disgusting is that its representation is no different from the

disgusting itself. The disgusting is always itself, it is never affected by the mediation of any

representation, and so would seem to correspond to what is required to make vicariousness

reassuring. And this would accord smoothly with the logic of Kant's system, which, as a

51Trans. from 'Economimesis' 92/25, with translation of geniessen and Ekel modified as before;

German: § 19, 452.

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system of idealised representation, must have as its limit the thing which does not represent

itself, but simply is itself.

We are therefore confronted with the question of whether the disgusting is

unheimlich. Freud's essay on that subject presents itself (in 1919) as a rare foray into the field

of aesthetics, in order to investigate those subjects which traditional aesthetics avoids,

namely negative feelings like repulsion rather than positive ones like beauty ('The "Uncanny"'

219). It concerns itself precisely with the negative of aesthetics, which for Kant is the

disgusting. Freud, as we alluded to in our previous chapter, defines the uncanny as the feeling

caused by the return of something from our unconscious which is now repressed (belief in

'animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts', as well as 'man's attitude to death,

involuntary repetition and the castration complex' (243)). As such then, the uncanny is very

close to the disgusting, because disgusting thoughts and feelings are for Freud part of what

repression is charged with excluding from consciousness. The ambiguity of the word

corresponds to the ambiguous position of the disgusting in Kant's system. It means the

opposite of heimlich 'at home' or 'in its rightful place' (cf. 220). But heimlich also means the

opposite of at home etc., i.e. the same thing as unheimlich (223). 52 Now being heimlich is

precisely the condition according to which a vicariousness of vomit could underpin Kant's

system: it would then be 'reassuring' (Freud cites 'inquiétant', 'worrying' as one translation of

unheimlich (221)) and 'identifiable'. And for this, it would have to be itself, i.e. be at home in

itself, or not be other than itself. What the equivalence of heimlich with unheimlich suggests

is that the reassuring identifiability of the disgusting is related to its opposite. Freud argues

52Freud in his review of The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words (Collected Papers. 5 vols. Trans. and

ed. Joan Riviere. London: Hogarth, 1948-1957. IV (1957), 184-191) argues that the use of a word to

mean one thing and its opposite is a habit associated with the unconscious, and with primitive societies.

The word unheimlich, in exhibiting this characteristic, is accordingly an unheimlich return of a manner

of using words overcome by adulthood or developed society.

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throughout his work that the repressed cannot represent itself as such, and must always find

something else to represent it in order to escape the censorship of the super-ego (in dreams,

jokes, stories etc.), and it may be that we can apply his argument to the disgusting in Kant.

In Part III of the essay Freud asks why certain experiences which correspond to his

definition of the uncanny are not experienced as such. As we saw in the previous chapter, a

first reason is that some people have successfully overcome their beliefs, impulses etc.,

whose return would otherwise be experienced as uncanny. But certain stories correspond to

the uncanny without being experienced as such, even when the returning unconscious belief

has not been overcome. This, Freud argues, is because we are able to accept uncanny events

as being part of the story's fictional premises. By suspending our disbelief, we can go along

with the magical beliefs which, had they been confirmed in real life, we would experience as

an uncanny return of beliefs overcome during the passage to adulthood. Freud postulates an

almost identical power for literature in relation to the uncanny as Kant had in relation to the

ugly: 'a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life' (249);

literature can make the unheimlich heimlich. But, he adds, 'there are many more means of

creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life' (Freud's emphasis). This is

owing to literature's ability to introduce uncanny incidents in a story which pretends to be the

truth (250). Because we believe in the story, we 'react to [the author's] inventions as we

would have reacted to real experiences' (250-251). But the author is at the same time free to

invent uncanny incidents which do not occur in real life, and hence has greater scope for

creating uncanny effects.

Freud remarks about this procedure, 'We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction

[Unbefriedigung], a kind of grudge [Groll] against the attempted deceit [Taüschung]' (251),

once we realise how the uncanny effect has been produced. This grudge is a reaction to our

previous enjoyment, which we now experience as unpleasant; in other words, we feel

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something similar to disgust at having this spiritual enjoyment not so much forced on us as in

Kant, but secreted into us against our will. The uncanny which literature is particularly suited

to producing, is disgusting. And that disgust is produced by deceiving us as to whether the

story is true or fictional, in other words by erasing the distinction between the object and its

representation. 53 This abolition constitutes an example of the uncanny given earlier in the

essay, which, although 'strictly speaking' it could have been included under animism, Freud

singles out as 'deserv[ing] special emphasis': 'an uncanny effect is often and easily produced

when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we

have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality' (244). Vicariousness of

vomit, in its cancellation of representative distance, corresponds to Freud's unheimlich.

According to Freud (and Derrida), the vicariousness of vomit, for all that it is itself,

unrepresentable, cannot be reassuring. 54 This is because, I would argue, the presentation of

the vicariousness of vomit as itself is already conditioned by a primary representation; the

heimlich is already unheimlich. That metadisgust which cannot be represented, but which

nonetheless (re)presents itself, is the dream of self-identical subjectivity which is interrupted

by mimesis. Smell denotes what Lacoue-Labarthe in 'Typographie' calls irreducible

representation, which is the condition of what we call identity, and which makes its

53One should add in passing that this distinction could still be maintained even in realistic fiction, in

which the reader "loses himself in the story"; such fiction can still preserve the representative distance

between fiction and reality which protects the reader from disgust. Of course, various forms of

entertainment real or imaginary (Aldous Huxley's 'feelies' in Brave New World (1932) or watching

Jaws with "3-D" spectacles) derive their particularity from their stimulation of disgust (as defined by

Kant).

54'Uncanny' once more has the double meaning of the Greek deinon: is uncanny that which represents

the unpresentable, and is uncanny the revelation of the unpresentable itself, i.e. the cancellation of its

(uncanny) representation.
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presentation of itself impossible. 55 It 'is starting from that impossibility that economimesis is

constrained in its process', says Derrida. But this sentence seems to credit something in Kant

with that insight, whereas, I argue, it is only by importing the awareness of primary

representation (from Freud, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe etc.) that we can see the limits of

Kant's system.

What smell undoes is the mastery of the absolute exterior of Taste by the word. The

word 'vomit' is the negative of Kant's system, but protects it from the smell which cannot be

accommodated within its system. These are the last words of 'Economimesis': 'A parergoric

remedy softens with speech, it consoles, it exhorts with the word. As its name indicates. [¶]

The word vomit arrests the vicariousness of disgust […]. It is determined by the system of the

beautiful, "the symbol of morality," as its other; it is then for philosophy, still, an elixir, even

in the very quintessence of its bad taste' (93/25). The words 'parergon', 'elixir' and 'remedy' all

recall the Phaedrus. The last two are translations of pharmakon, the word used to describe

writing and speeches, and which, as Derrida shows in 'Plato's Pharmacy', exists in an

analogous relationship to the logos in Plato's system as does smell in Kant's. 56 Both vomit

and writing are thought of as 1. absolutely external to and 2. absolutely necessary to both

systems. In both Plato's Pharmacy' and 'Economimesis', Derrida shows how both terms,

55Freud identifies the compulsion to repeat, which he was later to develop into the death instinct in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Trans. James Strachey (1950). SE XVIII (1955), 1-64, with 'The

"Uncanny"' 236-238, and Lacoue-Labarthe argues that the same compulsion points toward the originary

representation which he attempts to oppose to Platonic-Heideggerian mimesis ('Typographie' 243 and

243-244 n 108).

56The only use of parergon in the Phaedrus describes rhetoric in opposition to dialectic, and describes

it as a kind of Genuss: 'the man who is in his right mind should not practise at the gratification

[χαριζεσθαι] of his fellow-slaves [by using rhetoric], except as a secondary consideration [παρεργον]'

(73 e - 74 a).
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according to a movement of vicariousness and substitution - a movement of mimesis - undo

the systems which they support. What we must also remark is the use by Derrida of

vocabulary associated with the sublime to describe the disgusting: 'Vicariousness would only

be reassuring […] if it allowed us to step away from the abyss'. The disgusting, as redeemable

negative, is what allows us to escape the sublime. That the abyss is sublime is a

commonplace, but we are not talking about a sublime as defined by Kant, but by Lyotard,

immanently to Kant's definition: 'is sublime the presentation of the unpresentable or, more

rigorously, to take up again Lyotard's formulation, the presentation (of this) that there is some

[de l'] unpresentable.'57 As we saw with Derrida, the vicariousness of vomit, i.e. smell, is

unrepresentable and unpresentable. Implicit in 'Economimesis' is a presentation of smell as

the sublime which undoes the aesthetic. 58

Returning to Kant's discussion of music, we will find that he presents it as having

affinities with such a sublime at the same time as he relegates it to the position of least

conceptual and most sensual of arts. This ambiguity is already present in Kant's first

discussion of music in § 51 (3) ('on the art of the beautiful play of the sensations'), which

57'Est sublime la présentation de l'imprésentable ou, plus rigoureusement, pour reprendre la formule de

Lyotard, la présentation (de ceci) qu'il y a de l'imprésentable' (Lacoue-Labarthe, 'La vérité sublime'

101). It is in this essay that Lacoue-Labarthe argues that the sublime in Kant points toward an

understanding of art which exceeds the aesthetic. Although 'Economimesis' on one level refuses this

credit to the sublime, it grants it to a smell which it describes as analogous to Lacoue-Labarthe's

definition of the sublime.

58Karl Simms analyses a visit to the National Fishing Heritage Centre in Grimsby, in which the visitor,

in addition to visual exhibits, is confronted with the smells and tactile experiences which attend fishing,

arguing that this synaesthetic experience corresponds to the Lyotardean definition of the sublime. 'The

National Fishing Heritage Centre.' Epoché and Entertainment: Studies in Phenomenology and Popular

Culture. Eds. Michael T. Carroll and Peter Steeves. Forthcoming.

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deals with both the art of sound (music) and the art of color. Besides their ability to record

impressions of external objects, these arts are accompanied by a sensation, as to which it

cannot be decided whether it is sensual or reflective (i.e. artistic). Music can please because

the sounds it makes are agreeable to the senses (soothing etc.), or because the mathematical

proportions between these sounds, irrespective of whether they are agreeable or not, is found

to be beautiful by our judgement. In other words, from the outset it cannot be strictly decided

whether music is sensual enjoyment or fine art. In his ranking of the fine arts, in which he

seems implicitly to have decided to give music the benefit of the doubt and allowed it to be a

fine art, Kant ranks it just below poetry in terms of charm and mental movement, and last in

terms of culture supplied to the mind. So although music is considered a fine art, it

nevertheless is a predominantly sensual one: 'more a matter of enjoyment than of culture' (§

53, Ak. 328). It speaks without concepts, and through mere sensations (Ak. 328). It has more

variety than other arts, but its charm is a transitory one, which does not bear repetition or

leave any lasting pleasure. It is, in other words, very close to enjoyment, or to sensual

gratification granted by the mimètes, as defined by Plato. It is only granted the status of fine

art because the sounds it employs are reminiscent of what Kant calls tones (we might today

use 'moods'), which are associated with the contexts in which they are familiarly heard.

Music functions as a universal language of sensations, and the mathematical form given to

the sounds brings the different moods into association, and 'express[es], by means of [the]

proportioned attunement of the sensations, the aesthetic idea of a coherent whole of an

unspeakable wealth of thought, and to express it in conformity with a certain theme that is

prevalent in the piece' (§ 53 Ak. 328-329). Although transitory and lacking in serious

purpose, music nevertheless retains a kind of empirical associative link to indeterminate

Ideas, to moods which claim universal assent. In other words, music's place in the fine arts is

as tenuous as can be, and it is in all other regards a sensuous, enjoyable art. 59 It is because of

59Cf. Martin Weatherston. 'Kant's Assessment of Music in the Critique of Judgement.' British Journal

of Aesthetics 36:1 (January 1996). 56-65, for a conventional discussion of this topic.
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this that Lacoue-Labarthe can say, with some justification, that Kant's treatment of music

does not really add anything to Plato's.

But neither Lacoue-Labarthe nor Derrida take into account what Kant himself added

to his discussion of music. After the demonstration we have just followed comes another

point ('Moreover, music has a certain lack of urbanity about it …' (§ 53 Ak. 330), which Kant

added in the second edition. Kant describes this 'want':

[Music] it extends its influence (on the neighborhood) farther than people wish, and

so, as it were, imposes [aufdringt] itself on others, and hence impairs the freedom of

those outside of the musical party [Gesellschaft]. The arts that address themselves to

the eye do not do this; for if we wish to keep out their impressions [ihren Eindruck

nicht einlassen], we need merely turn our eyes away. The situation here is almost the

same as with the enjoyment [Ergötzung; Bernard: 'delight'] produced by the odor that

spreads far. Someone who pulls his perfumed handkerchief from his pocket gives all

those next to and around him a treat, whether they want it or not, and compels them,

if they want to breathe, to enjoy [genießen] at the same time […] (§ 53 Ak. 330; my

emphasis).

Music is described as disgusting in all but name here. Not only is it 'almost' mere enjoyment

(Genuss), but it forces itself on us against our will. And music is compared to smell, in what

is almost a repetition of the description of smell as pre-eminently disgusting in the

Anthropology. 60 People cannot resist it 'if they want to breathe': Kant's casual remark betrays

the fact that the disgusting, like the sublime threatens us with death. As the most enjoyable of

60Compare: 'by interfering with individual freedom, smell is less sociable than taste; when confronted

with many dishes and bottles, one can choose that which suits his pleasure without forcing others to

participate in that pleasure' (§ 21, 40; trans. from 'Economimesis' 25).

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arts - the pre-eminent art of Genuss - music is the most distant from serious purpose and

philosophy. But this relegation affiliates it, inevitably (Kant could only have omitted to add

the extra point to § 53 in the second edition at the cost of the internal coherence of his work),

to disgust, to what is most distant from Kant's philosophy because it marks its limit. Derrida

does not seem to notice the affinities between disgust and music, even though it is his

analysis of disgust which uncovers those aspects in which it is similar to what Kant

condemns in music.

The comparison with music reveals another component of the disgusting: the

disgusting, as something which affects the subject from the outside against his will, is

heteronomy. It is therefore similar to the passivity of inspiration. This is brought out by the

description of the subject forced to enjoy music against his will as being one of the others

who are 'not of the musical company'. It is the autonomy of the individual, his separation

from the collective which is at stake. This is reinforced by Kant's footnote, in which he

crossly complains about the singing of songs at family prayers, for forcing the family's

neighbours 'to either join in the singing or put aside whatever they were thinking about' (§ 53,

Ak. 330 n 1). Thinking is, at least in Kant's framework, a self-centered or even solitary act

(this attitude to thinking corresponds to the description of thought as an inner monologue in

the Sophist 263 e). 61 What is being confronted here are analogues of the Apollinian and the

Dionysian as they are described in the Birth of Tragedy: the Apollinian is the principium

individuationis, whereas the Dionysian impulse to lose individuality in a unity with nature is

expressed by music (§ 1, 36). 62 Underneath the superficial sidelining of music in the third

61Cf. Derrida, 'La double séance' 209-210/184.

62Kant's fate at the hands of noisy worshippers is not without analogy to that of Pentheus in The

Bacchae, who cannot behold the Maenads' revelry without dressing up as a Maenad and eventually

being torn apart by them, in other words by becoming part of their revelry. When he is torn up by the

Maenads, he loses any distinction between himself and the revellers: his principium individuationis is
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Critique lies a suspicion that it is a form of pathos, in the sense associated with both

inspiration and mimesis in the Phaedrus (like mimesis, music impresses itself on the

listener). 63 In its disgusting sublimity, music points toward what in the Phaedrus both undoes

the aesthetic and defines the role of art.

We may suspect therefore that Kant's treatment of music reveals a gap quite similar

to the one revealed by Plato's treatment. What I want to show now is how Kant's discussion

of nature fills in the gap left in Plato's account of music. Kant argues (again like Plato) that

beauty does not respond to the imperatives of accuracy and practicality. And like Plato, he

retains a certain connection between the work of art and the real and the practical. But, unlike

Plato, this loose connection is seen as being to art's advantage. This, I will try to show, makes

the work of art in Kant similar to the beloved in the Phaedrus. The Critique departs from

Plato in explicitly extending to the work of art the inspiration which he reserved for the

object of divine love. Kant also extends the terms of this connection to the artist himself,

arguing that an interaction between inspiration and the artist's mind - similar to the interaction

between Imagination and concepts in the work of art - must take place within the artist. In so

doing, he rearticulates the relationship of the artist to the source of his inspiration. Now, in

Plato, the source of inspiration is the Muse. Kant's Critique therefore addresses the task -

neglected by Plato - of defining the role of the Muse in its relation to the poet.

cancelled (although that was presumably not his chief concern at the time). Teiresias's plea to Pentheus

before his ordeal might have been directed at Kant: 'Do not be so certain that power/ is what matters in

the life of man; do not mistake/ for wisdom the fantasies of your sick mind./ Welcome the god to

Thebes; crown your head;/ pour him libations and join his revels' (Euripides. The Bacchae 310-315,

167. Trans. William Arrowsmith. Euripides I. Eds. David Grene and Richard Lattimore. Chicago and

London: U of Chicago P, 1955. 155-220).

63Lacoue-Labarthe draws attention, in Musica Ficta 205-207/109-110, to the affinities between

Heidegger and Nietzsche's condemnation of music and Plato's condemnation of mimesis.

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3. Consolation

In the 'Dialectic of the Aesthetical Judgement' (§§ 55-60) toward the end of the third

Critique, 64 when Kant is summing up the definition of beauty he has attempted, he

contemplates a situation in which beauty finds itself in a position similar to that of poetry at

the end of the Republic:

The principle of taste can be interpreted in two basically different ways. We can say

that taste always judges by determining bases that are empirical and hence can be

given only a posteriori through our senses, or we can grant that taste judges on a

basis that is a priori. The former critique of taste would be an empiricist one; the

latter would be rationalistic. On the empiricist critique of taste the object of our

liking would not be different from the agreeable; on the rationalistic one, if the

judgement rested on determinate concepts, the object of our liking would not be

distinct from the good; and so [in either case] all the beauty we find in the world

would be denied away [weggeleugnet ; trans. modified], 65 and we would have

nothing left in its place [Statt] except a special term, which might perhaps refer to a

certain blend of those two kinds of liking (§ 58 Ak. 346; Latin not italicised in

Weischedel or Pluhar).

64The Critique is in the first instance divided into two Divisions, the first of which is the 'Analytic of

Aesthetic Judgement' (§§ 1-54), the second, the 'Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgement'. The first division is

divided into two books, the 'Analytic of the Beautiful' (§§ 1-22), and the 'Analytic of the Sublime' (§§

23-29; including the 'Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgements' §§ 30-54).

65Pluhar translates with 'denied', the equivalent of geleugnet.

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The discussion of taste carried out in the third Critique is marked as an attempt to revoke the

denial of beauty, which is literally a 'denial away'; beauty would be banished, forced to vacate

its place, denied admittance to the space of truth. 66 Kant performs this task first by

distinguishing aesthetic judgement from the 'concepts of nature' for which the understanding

is responsible (Introduction iii, Ak. 176). These concepts include concepts like causality

which are used for what would be called practical activities today (which must not, of course,

be confused with the practical reason, which is for Kant a moral faculty); 67 the

understanding is the faculty which Plato's tradesmen use when going about their business.

Kant distinguishes the aesthetic arts from technè in its Platonic, technical interpretation.

Secondly, he argues that in 'the case of a judgement that demands subjective universality, we

are not dealing with a cognitive judgement[…]. Hence what we must justify as a priori valid

is [not] a judgement presenting what a [certain] thing is' (§ 31 Ak. 280). By distinguishing

itself from the understanding, the judgement is no longer bound to represent 'what a thing is'.

Taste, like poetry in the Ion, is neither concerned with the accurate imitation of reality, nor

with the practical use of what it judges.

If we wish to decide whether something is beautiful or not, we […] use the

imagination […] to refer the presentation to the subject and his feeling of pleasure or

displeasure. Hence a judgement of taste is not a cognitive judgement […] but an

66Is it to bring out the echo of Plato's expulsion of the poet in Kant's attempt to find him a place that

Bernard perceptively translates weggeleugnet as 'banished' in his edition?

67Kant angrily makes this point himself in the longer version of his introduction ('First Introduction') to

the Critique (published by Pluhar in the Translator's Supplement, 385-441) where he distinguishes what

is practical according to concepts of nature (the practicality of our everyday activities) - which Kant

calls the 'technically practical' in the version of the introduction which he published with the first two

editions of the Critique (Intro., Pt. 1, Ak. 172) - from what is practical according to the concept of

freedom (morality) (cf. First Introduction Pt. 1, Ak. 195-196).

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aesthetic one, by which we mean a judgement whose determining basis cannot be

other than subjective (§ 1 Ak. 203).

This statement is made in the First Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful (§§ 1-5), in

which the judgement of taste is discussed according to quality, and in which Kant first argues

that Taste judges without any interest (moral or practical) in its object. And according to the

first moment alone, beauty would be mere sensual gratification, making Kant's artist

indistinguishable from Plato's Sophist. But Kant sets aside appetite, opinion, and all the

things downgraded in Plato's analysis as empirically subjective and arbitrary, while

describing judgements of taste as rationally subjective and universally valid. Aesthetic

judgement is concerned with our subjective feelings, but claims that these feelings can be

expected of everyone, that they claim universal assent (cf. § 31).

Kant argues this complicated point in the second moment ('of the judgement of taste

according to quantity', §§ 6-9). The nerve of his difficult argument lies in § 9, where he

answers the question posed by that section's title ('Whether in a Judgement of Taste the

Feeling of Pleasure Precedes the Judging of the Object or the Judging Precedes the Pleasure')

by stating: 'it must be the universal communicability of the mental state, in the given

presentation, which underlies the judgement of taste as its subjective condition, and the

pleasure in the object must be its consequence' (§ 9 Ak. 217). The subjective pleasure is the

consequence of the judgement of taste, and this judgement has as its basis the 'universal

communicability of the mental state'. The subjective pleasure in the beautiful is differentiated

from empirical pleasure by virtue of being caused by a universally communicable mental

state. But nothing 'can be communicated universally except cognition, as well as

presentation'. And since Kant also argues that the beauty of an object can't be reduced to a

particular concept (for then it would be the object of the utilitarian or scientific judgement

from which Kant wants to distinguish it) he says that it is the result of the harmony of the
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presentational faculties referred to cognition - not of a particular object - but in general. 68

The rationality of aesthetic judgements is secured by re-establishing an (albeit loose) link

between subjective feelings and the very understanding from which Kant attempts to

distinguish aesthetic judgement. In Plato too, opinion, belief and the senses retained a link to

reason, but the relationship was one of strict hierarchical subordination. With Kant, the

relationship is more one of mutual interdependence, in which the essence of aesthetical

pleasure lies in the subjective feelings, but still requires harmony with the understanding. In

other words, the subjective faculties subordinated by Plato have become the senior partners in

the harmony of the faculties which underlies aesthetic pleasure for Kant. 69

Turning from Kant's analysis of natural beauty to his analysis of the beauty of art, we

find a crucial distinction for our argument. This remark is made rather late in the Critique, in

the last part of the First Division, namely the 'Deduction of Pure Aesthetical Judgements.'

Although this part follows the Analytic of the Sublime, and is technically part of the second

book, it concerns itself more widely with all aspects of aesthetics, relating to both sublime

and beautiful, and contains the most important statements on aesthetics of the Critique.

A natural beauty is a beautiful thing; artistic beauty is a beautiful presentation

[Vorstellung] of a thing.

In order to judge a natural beauty to be that, I need not have a prior concept

of what kind of thing the object is [meant] to be […]. Rather, I like the mere form of

the object when I judge it, on its own account and without knowing the purpose. But

if the object is given as a product of art, and as such is to be declared beautiful, then

68Hence, beauty is 'a feeling, accompanying the given presentation, of a free play of the presentational

powers directed to cognition in general' (§ 9 Ak. 217).

69Cf. Derrida. 'Force et signification' (1963) 16. L'écriture et la différence. 9-49/ 'Force and

Signification' 7. Writing and Difference. 3-30.

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we must first base it on a concept of what the thing is [meant] to be, since art always

presupposes a purpose in the cause […] (§ 48 Ak. 311).

This remark can be usefully contrasted with the third moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful

('of judgements of taste according to the relation of the purposes which are brought into

consideration therein' (§§ 10-17)), which makes an opposite statement. Kant argues there that

we find objects of nature beautiful if their purpose seems to be our subjective pleasure,

without its being formed according to any determinate purpose (§ 10). Kant excludes the

possibility of the object being formed for any particular purpose, because determinate

purposes can only be empirical (i.e. gratification) or rational (i.e. moral). The demand that the

object of beauty's form express its purposiveness, but that it should be perceived by the

judging subject as being without a determinate purpose (§ 17, Ak. 236), is thus a

development of the preceding moment's demonstration. If beauty is caused by a harmony of

the faculties with concepts in general, but not any particular concept, it must be purposive,

but not with regard to any purpose.

Kant goes on to distinguish objects of pure beauty (pulchritudo vaga) from objects

which, as well as being beautiful, have some determinate purpose (dependent beauty or

pulchritudo adhaerans, as he puts it in § 16 Ak. 229). The purpose of the object, Kant argues,

is a hindrance to its beauty: 'Much that would be liked directly in intuition 70 could be added

to a building, if only the building were not [meant] to be a church' (§ 16 Ak. 230), in his

memorable words. But one suspects that even if the practicalities of the object placed no

constrictions on its aesthetic aims, the very fact that a practical function inhabited the object

would lessen its beauty for Kant. Because no such purpose can be ascribed, Kant argues, to

70Bernard: 'which would please the eye'.

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the beauty of nature, it is easier for natural beauty to remain pure.71 But the beauty of art, on

the other hand, must be purposive. This raises a few problems. Is a church, which Kant

includes in the category of impure beauty, a work of art or of nature? The church is a

beautiful object, not a presentation of one, and on that score should be defined as nature! But

the church is purposive, and as such cannot be natural. And when Kant writes that 'as the

agreement of the manifold in a thing with its inner destination […] constitutes the perfection

of the thing, it follows that in judging of artificial beauty the perfection of the thing must be

taken into account', does this mean that in a painting of flowers their perfection must be taken

into account? Not only would this contradict Kant's view of nature as lacking any definite

purpose, 72 but it would also imply that a painting of an object defective in its purpose, or of

ugly natural objects, would suffer aesthetically as a result. We must a contrario posit a

purposiveness for the work of art which is different from that which restricts the beauty of a

church. Art's purpose is to (re)present the purpose of its object, whatever that purpose might

be, including the purposelessness of nature as well as the purposiveness of a church. 73

71'Flowers are free natural beauties. Hardly anyone apart from the botanist knows what sort of thing a

flower is [meant] to be' (§ 16 Ak. 299). Compare Heidegger's remark, quoted in Ch. 1, Exergue: 'Surely

physis still means emergence for Plato […] in the way a rose emerges, unfolding itself and showing

itself out of itself' (Nietzsche Ch. 22, 181). Aristotle's remark, quoted above (Ch. 1, Exrg., n) on that 'art

[τεχνη] in some cases completes [επιτηλει] what nature cannot bring to a finish [απεργασασθαι]'

(Physics 199a15), might be seen to refer in the first instance to the art of gardening, which allows the

flower to show itself out of itself. Kant inherits a concept of the flower as representative of nature as the

opposite of craft to which Heidegger also reverts.

72The only exception to this rule, writes Kant, is man, whose moral destination gives him a purpose that

can be decided a priori by Reason (cf. § 17 Ak. 233).

73The church would, in the end, fall into the curious hybrid category of something naturally beautiful,

but made according to a purpose (and therefore non-natural). The limitations of Kant's system on this

subject are of the sort continually critiqued by Heidegger. Heidegger would regard the beauty of the

temple or a church as a revelation of its being. One could, from another tack, develop Kant's argument
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If therefore we judge according to a 'concept of what the thing is meant to be' we are

judging the accuracy of the artwork; in the beauty of art, the duty of imitation re-emerges.

After a short digression Kant goes on to qualify this statement with a remark already

mentioned in relation to 'Economimesis': 'Fine art shows its superiority precisely in this, that

it describes things beautifully that in nature we would dislike or find ugly' (§ 48 Ak. 312). So

the work of art is not judged according to the purposiveness of its object, but according to its

representation of its object's purpose. The superiority of art resides in its independence from

any value judgement of the purpose of its object. In other words, implicit in Kant's analysis is

the fact that art grants to the purposive objects it represents, the purity which before was the

preserve of natural beauty. Artistic imitation removes the definite purpose of purposive

objects. But for this to be true, there must be an inadequation between the imitation and its

object. This is achieved, Kant goes on to say, in sculpture, by the use of allegory, for example

depicting a warlike spirit as Mars. Thus the presentation's duty to be faithful to the object it

presents is not one of strict identity with this object. 74 What does constitute this duty is

by comparing the church to a painting of a church. The purpose of the painting of the church is to

represent the church and its architectural, religious and social purposes. We could go one stage further

and argue that the beauty of the church is in fact a representation of its non-artistic purpose.

74This is a different point from the one made by Derrida in 'Economimesis' (59, 62, 67/4, 6, 9), when he

argues that Kant frees the artist from the duty of making works which imitate nature as thing (i.e. things

in nature, this table etc.), in order to show that for Kant this free creativity is in fact an imitation of

nature's own act of creation. Abrams refers to Kant many times in his work, usually to point out that

some of the Romantics were influenced by him (cf. 90, 174, 212, 216). Intriguingly, he also discusses

the passage in the Critique § 46, in which the very argument highlighted by Derrida is developed, as 'an

extreme' (207) of the 'German Theories of Vegetable Genius' which are the subject of Ch. VIII.iii (201-

213). Although Abrams's citation of Kant's argument registers the fact that Kant saw Genius as both

imitative and creative, he does not acknowledge that such a point poses any problem for his theory. Nor

does he credit Kant with very much at all, writing that he displays a 'basically static and taxonomic
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approach to the questions of art' (207). This becomes understandable when we see that an analogous

theory to Kant's, as articulated by Edward Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1918), is

cited by Abrams as an example of an imitative theory of art (I.ii, 12; cf. also 337 n 17). Kant is still too

imitative, and not creative enough. Abrams's discussion of the third Critique is restricted to an awkward

paraphrase of Kant's doctrine of purposefulness without purpose (207-208), and its influence on the

Romantics, who are seen as adopting Kant's framework, but liberating it of its imitative, 'static'

elements. Kant is a decidedly awkward figure for Abrams, who seems to have difficulty understanding

how the views of art he values should proceed from such a position as Kant's: 'Even an aesthetic

philosophy so abstract and seemingly [!] academic as that of Kant can be shown to have modified the

work of poets' (5). The awkwardness lies in the fact that the concept of imitation/creation which Derrida

shows to be at work in the Critique completely undoes the opposition set up by The Mirror and the

Lamp. For, Derrida shows, the lamp of the poet's genius for Kant is in fact an imitation of Nature, and

the two concepts of artistic creation opposed by Abrams are interchangeable: Kant 'places under

Nature's dictate what is most wildly free in the production of art. Genius is the locus of such a dictation:

the means by which art receives its rules from nature. All propositions of an anti-mimetic cast, all

condemnations levelled against imitation are undermined at this point' ('Economimesis' 59/4;

punctuation corrected). Robert Griffin also makes the point that lamp and mirror imagery are linked

throughout the history of Western thought, where they are used to give an account of artistic and

philosophical creation similar to Kant's (Wordsworth's Pope 119-122). Selma Zebouni's 'Mimesis et je

ne sais quoi: Boileau, Kant et Derrida.' Cahiers du Dix septieme 5:2 (Fall 1991). 53-61, summarises

'Economimesis' up to the discussion of vomit, in order to show that a similar argument applies to

Boileau. Bouileau's description of beautiful art as imitative contrasts, Zebouni argues, with his

description of the sublime, in the same way as the imitation of nature as thing does to that of nature as

act in Kant. Undoubtedly, Kant's remark that art can represent the ugly as beautiful is almost a

paraphrase of Boileau (who himself is paraphrasing Aristotle; cf. Bernard's footnote to this remark at

Critique 195, n 1). But it is also Genius which makes such beautiful imitations possible in Kant. In

other words, even though Genius has affinities to the sublime, it cannot be opposed so readily to the

beautiful as Zebouni would have. Regrettably, Zebouni concludes by reducing Derrida's deconstruction

of Kant to the relatively secondary critique of the anthropocentrism which characterises Kant's system
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defined by Kant as the following: 'Let this [the point Kant makes with respect to sculpture]

suffice for the beautiful presentation of an object, which is only the form of a content's

exhibition, the form by which this concept is universally communicated. Now giving this

form to the product of fine art requires merely taste' (§ 48 Ak. 312). Now in § 9 we saw that a

harmony of the presentational powers in general is required for the universal

communicability of the aesthetic judgement. Here too, the exhibition by the work of art of

what the thing it presents is meant to be ensures the universal communicability of the powers

it brings into play. 75 Taste, which ensures the faithfulness of the representation to the object

presented (§ 48), has a function analogous to harmony with the presentational faculties in

general (§ 9): it makes the beauty of the work universally valid. At first blush it might seem

that imitative faithfulness is a redundant repetition of what was already guaranteed by the

harmony of the faculties in § 9. But faithfulness to the object presented is actually the

equivalent, in works of art, of the harmony of the faculties in works of nature, which would

not be available to non-natural objects without the intercession of art.

Kant writes that this accuracy must be kept 'from interfering with the freedom in the

play of these powers' (§ 48 Ak. 312). So Kant reintroduces cognition, accuracy and imitative

faithfulness only in order to guarantee the rationality of the aesthetic judgement, while still

claiming that they don't interfere with the play of the subjective powers. A certain restricted

degree of imitation is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the work of art. What is

(free aesthetic creativity, the beastly Kant says, is only available to human beings; cf. 'Economimesis'

60/5), in order to show that a similar anthropocentrism can be reproached in Boileau. Cf. also by the

same author 'La Mimesis en question: Métafiction et auto-référentialité au XVIIeme siècle.' Papers on

French Seventeenth Century Literature 16:30 (1989). 161-179.

75As Kant writes later, taste 'introduces clarity and order into a world of thought, and hence makes the

ideas durable, fit for an approval that is both lasting and universal' (§ 50 Ak. 319).
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required in addition is what Kant calls genius, which allows the artistic imagination to

exercise its freedom, even as it harmonises with the understanding:

For the imagination (as a productive [productives] cognitive power) is very mighty

when it creates [in Schaffung] 76 as it were, another nature out of the material that

actual nature gives it […]. We may even restructure experience; and though in doing

so we continue to follow analogical laws, yet we also follow principles which reside

higher up, namely in reason[…]. In this process we feel our freedom from the laws of

association […]; for although it is under that law that nature lends [geliehen] us

material, yet we can process [verarbeitet werden] that material into something quite

different, namely into something that surpasses nature (§ 49 Ak. 314). 77

Kant reaffirms here the liberal relation of the work of art to reality: it borrows its material

from actual nature, and when it restructures this material it still follows analogical laws

which maintain a figurative, rather than a literal link with nature. But the imagination also

'creates' another nature, rather than merely copying actual nature; it is free from the 'laws of

association'. And this nature 'surpasses' actual nature; the work of art creates an enriched

76Schaffen also means 'to work' (Wahrig 4-5).

77Plotinus develops a similar argument in On Intellectual Beauty. Writing in the spirit of Plato's

Phaedrus, he argues that the work of art cannot be criticised for being an imitation of things, because it

does not imitate the sensual object, but returns to [ανατρεχουσιν] the rational source (i.e. the idea)

[λογουσ] from which the natural object proceeds [εξ ων η φυσισ]. Art therefore actually makes the

things themselves [αυτων ποιουσι] and at the same time supplements [προστιθεασι] the defects of

objects which lack beauty (1, 35-40; cf. also On Love Pts. 1-2). Rather than imitate the real world, art

enhances it by imitating the intelligible world. Cf. also On Intellectual Beauty 8, 1-20 and 12, 10-20,

where Plotinus argues that the beautiful results from its relation to the highest beauty of which it is an

image.
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version of nature by not imitating it. This is possible because now that language isn't reduced

to exhibiting a concept, it becomes capable of an unlimited signification:

Now if a concept is provided with a presentation of the imagination such that, even

though this presentation belongs to the exhibition of the concept, yet it prompts, even

by itself, so much thought as can never be comprehended within a determinate

concept and thereby the presentation aesthetically expands the concept itself in an

unlimited way (§ 49 Ak. 315).

Language, thanks to the freedom of the imagination, is no longer reduced here to a mere copy

of the actual, limited world, but instead is capable of creating a new world of unlimited

dimensions. This raises the possibility that the work of art in Kant is like the beloved in the

Phaedrus: just as the beloved reminds us of the absent heavens, so the work of art would

strive toward the supersensual.

This qualified emancipation from the duty of mimesis for art is mirrored by its

relationship to the practical in Kant's aesthetic:

Art is likewise distinguished from craft. The first is also called a free art, the second

could also be called a mercenary art. We regard free art [as an art] that could only

[…] succeed […] if it is […] an occupation that is agreeable on its own account;

mercenary art we regard as labor, i.e., as an occupation that is on its own account

disagreeable […] and that attracts us only through its effect (e.g. pay) […] (§ 43 Ak.

304). 78

78The distinction is very close to Heidegger's distinction between the authentic and debased senses of

technè.
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But after distinguishing art from crafts and business, Kant adds this qualification: 'in all the

free arts there is yet a need for something in the order of a constraint, or, as it is called, a

mechanism. […] Without this the spirit, which in art must be free and which alone animates

the work, would have no body at all and evaporate completely' (§ 43 Ak. 304). Art, although

a superior activity to craft, still needs the constraint of craft, 79 just as it needs the constraint

of a certain resemblance to the real world. And the contrast between the value of art and the

value of practical activity is analogous to that between the artistic and the actual world. Fine

art 'must be free in the sense of not being a mercenary occupation and hence a kind of labor,

whose magnitude can be judged, exacted, or paid for according to a determinate standard' (§

51 Ak. 321). 80 Fine art does not participate in the economy of exchange, because its value

cannot be determined according to the values of the limited economy it transcends; just as the

work of art isn't exchangeable with the object of its description because it expands this object

in an unlimited way. Kant closes the analysis from which I have quoted by saying that the

poet is characterised by his 'accomplishing more than he promises': he promises to entertain

us, and gives us food for the Understanding as a free extra. 81 The work of art's unlimited

generosity, giving more than it promised for no reward with its unlimited creative

signification, is thus distinguished from the practical world where limited goods are only

exchanged for each other, where language merely copies the thing it describes. 82 Kant

79Cf. 'Economimesis' 61-63/6-7. Much of what follows is suggested by Derrida's essay.

80 Cf. 'Economimesis' 61/5.

81Cf. 'Economimesis' 71-72/11-12.

82'You say: the point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same

kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning. The money,

and the cow you can buy with it' (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 120, 49). The way in

which the word is exchanged for its meaning, serves only to purchase its meaning in Wittgenstein's

characterisation of mimetic language, underlines the analogy between imitative uses of language and the

practical world of circular economy.

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contrasts the poet with the orator in the same section, who promises to occupy our

understanding, and gives us only entertainment. The orator is stingy in the same way as

Plato's sophist, and the poet is generous like the lover who is contrasted to the sophist in the

Phaedrus. Kant's poet relates to his orator in the field of economics, just as Plato's divine

lover relates to the sensual lover/sophist.

Kant differs from Plato in that the freedom from imitation and practicality he gives to

art is qualified. But this qualification has a certain degree of freedom built into it, in order to

allow art to serve as symbol of the supersensual. In § 49, not only does art create 'another

nature', but it does so by following principles that are 'higher up' than those of empirical

nature. Kant expands on this: 'Such presentations of the imagination we may call ideas. One

reason for this is that they do at least strive toward something that lies beyond the bounds of

experience, and hence try to approach an exhibition of rational concepts […]' (§ 49 Ak. 314).

The free play allowed by the loose harmony between the objective and subjective faculties in

objects of beauty enables them to strive towards this dimension, and thus create another

world that transcends the ordinary practical one. This remark comes in the last section of the

Critique of Aesthetical Judgement:

The beautiful is a symbol of the morally good; and only because we refer the

beautiful to the morally good […] does our liking for it include a claim for everyone's

assent, while the mind is also conscious of being ennobled, by this [reference], above

a mere receptivity for pleasure derived from sense impressions […] (§ 59 Ak. 353). 83

83Plotinus presents a similar hierarchical relationship between the beautiful and the good (the beautiful

as inferior to the good; the good as telos of the beautiful) in The Intelligibles are in Intelligence Pt.

12 (104-105) (Que les intelligibles ne sont pas hors de l'intelligence: du Bien. Ennéades (Trans.

Bréhier) V Bk. 5 (91-107)). I thank Professor Clark for drawing my attention to this passage.
 256

In so doing, objects of beauty become a symbol for morality; only by achieving this does the

harmony between the subjective and objective faculties in objects of beauty guarantee their

rationality. Kant's object of beauty works therefore in an analogous way to the beloved in the

Phaedrus, as a symbol for the supersensual, which is a reminder in the sensual world of the

absent supersensual. In the Phaedrus, Plato denies the Lover's inspiration to the poet, who

has to settle for an inferior one. But in Kant, beauty performs the role performed by memory

in Plato. Kant's artist is Plato's Lover.

Kant also examines the question avoided by Plato of how the artist uses inspiration to

create the work of art. Genius, the power to express the boundless aesthetic ideas we

discussed earlier is given to the artist by nature: 'Genius is the talent (natural endowment

[Naturgabe] 84) that gives the rule to art. […] [T]alent is an innate productive ability of the

artist and as such belongs to nature' (§ 46 Ak. 307). 85 And genius inspires: 'Genius itself

cannot describe […] how it brings about its products[…]. That is why, if an author owes a

product to his genius, he himself does not know how he came by the ideas for it […]' (§ 46

Ak. 308). 86 Although the effects of beauty in Kant are similar to those of inspiration in Plato,

84Literally, 'the Gift of nature'.

85Cf. 'Economimesis' 59, 67/4, 9.

86Inspiration acts like the magnet in the Ion, inspiring genius in a chain of others: 'The product of a

genius […] is an example […] not to be imitated, but to be followed by another genius. (For in mere

imitation the element of genius in the work - which constitutes its spirit - would be lost.) The other

genius […] is aroused by it to a feeling of his own originality' (§ 49 Ak. 318; cf. 'Economimesis' 69-70,

74/10-11, 13). Kant writes in the Anthropology that the sympathy caused by the imagination provokes a

similar transfer of states of being from one person to another. Imagination allows madness and fits to

provoke similar behaviour in those who behold them. Kant recounts the story of 'a man who fell into a

grave fury; two or three bystanders who found themselves with him fell into the same state […]: which

is why one must not advise those with fragile nerves […] to visit mad houses out of curiosity' ('ein
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inspiration performs a different role in Kant. In both Plato and Kant, inspiration is the result

of earthly beauty, and the cause of artistic beauty. But nature is the source of inspiration for

the artist in Kant, while the supersensual is the source of the inspiration brought about for the

Mann in heftige Raserei geriet, zwei oder drei beistehende durch den Anblick desselben plötzlich auch

darein versetzt wurden, wiewohl dieser Zufall nur vorbeigehend war; daher es Nervenschwachen

(Hypokondrischen) nicht zu raten ist, aus Neugierde Tollhaüser zu besuchen' (§ 29, 482/ § 32, 55).

Madness is synonymous with inspiration in the Phaedrus, and is spread by the imagination in the

Anthropology. And this spread is also, as in the Phaedrus, characterised by both a loss of self-control -

a being-affected-from-the-outside - and imitation: 'people full of vivaciousness to whom one feelingly,

or above all angrily, recounts an event, make mimicries, so profound is their attention, and involuntarily

they come to take on the appropriate expression' ('lebenhafte Personnen, wenn jemand ihnen etwas im

Affekt, vornehmlich des Zorns, was ihm begegnet sei, erzählt, bei starker Attention Gesichter dazu

schneiden, und unwillkürlich in ein Spiel der Mienen, die zu jenen Effekt passen, versetzt werden' (§ 29,

484/ § 32, 55; cf. Anthropologie Pt. II Div. 1, 'Of the characteristics of Mimicries (644-645/146). As

Kant writes later, imagination without rules 'makes a plaything of man, and the unfortunate one cannot

master the flow of his representations [Vorstellungen]' ('mit dem Menschen spielt, und der Unglückliche

den Lauf seiner Vorstellungen gar nicht in seiner Gewalt hat' (§ 30, 485/ § 33, 57). In the

Anthropology, Kant shows much more awareness of the overpowering nature of imagination, and its

analogue inspiration, than he does in the third Critique, in which the effect of inspiration on the poet is

far more harmonious. The difference between the Critique and the Anthropology on this point is

underlined by the fact that Kant shows disgust operating in a similar manner to inspiration in the

Anthropology. Vomiting, discussed two paragraphs before Kant's remarks on fits, exemplifies such an

event: 'The spectacle of others when they enjoy disgusting things (for example, when the Tunguse suck

the snot from their childrens' nose and swallow it) provokes whoever is watching to the point of making

him vomit, as if he himself were forced to [participate in] such enjoyment' ('Der Anblick des Genusses

ekeler Sachen an anderen (z.B. wenn die Tungusen den Rotz aus den Nasen ihrer Kinder mit einem

Tempo aussaugen und verschlucken) bewegt den Zuschauer eben so zum Erbrechen, als wenn

ihm selbst ein solcher Genuß aufgedrungen würde' (§ 29, 481/§ 32, 55). Disgust, just like inspiration, is

spread by the imagination.

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beholder of the work of art (whereas in Plato, the source of both forms of inspiration is the

supersensual). Nature confidently plays in Kant the role tentatively attributed to the Muses by

Plato. 87 And it is this which raises the problem of the role played by the artist in the work of

art. He cannot simply be a mouthpiece for nature, or else he would not truly be like nature,

which is independent and creative by definition. Kant writes in § 50 that inspiration is not

sufficient to produce a work of art: taste, which is 'commensurate with the laws of the

understanding', and which is governed by the artist's mind, must control genius. This division

between Taste as the critical faculty by which one judges, and Genius as the creative faculty

is found again in so many critics who wrote after Kant (Coleridge, Valéry and T. S. Eliot

immediately spring to mind) as to have become conventional. The otherworldly is granted to

the poet by inspiration, and he uses his worldly Taste to shape it. The relation of inspiration

to Taste is like that of the imagination to the understanding: Kant assumes a kind of mutually

beneficial co-operation between them. Taste clips the wings of inspiration without destroying

its spirit, the understanding does not impede the free play of the imagination.88 And the taste

87Kant paranthetically and reluctantly suggest that music might inspire the poet, without however

allowing it to resemble genius in any way: 'Even music, for he who does not listen to it with the ear of a

connoisseur, can put a philosopher or a poet into a disposition in which, depending on his activities or

his particular taste, he may seize hold of the thoughts that fly by him, which, alone in his room, he

would not have as much joy in catching' ('Selbst Musik, für den der sie nicht als Kenner anhört, kann

einen Dichter oder Philosophen in eine Stimmung setzen, darin ein jeder nach seinen Geschäften oder

seiner Liebhaberei Gedanken haschen und derselben auch mächtig werden kann, die er, wenn er in

seinem Zimmer einsam sich hingesetzt hätte, nicht so glücklich würde angefangen haben'

(Anthropologie § 27, 475/§ 30, 51). Music, like the divine inspiration of the poet, is described as a

physiological enhancement of the creative faculties on a personal level. Note again the way music

prevents us from being alone, and its affecting the mind from the outside in order to open it to other

creative possibilities.

88'Taste like the power of judgement in general consists in disciplining (or training) genius. It severely

clips its wings and makes it more civilized or polished' (§ 50 Ak. 319).
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which controls inspiration, is also given to the artist by nature. Kant is forced to put in place a

division of labor between inspiration and the artist's mind, in which the artist uses a power

derived from nature in order not to imitate nature, becomes like nature in not imitating it.

It is, however, untrue in one crucial respect to say that Kant's poet is Plato's Lover.

For although artistic creations perform the same role as Plato's beloved in Kant, and in so

doing makes explicit the identity between poet and lover suggested and concealed in the

Phaedrus, there is something missing. And this missing element is something intrinsic to the

lover, namely the possibility of heartbreak. This realisation forces us to take issue with the

contrast between Kant and Plato which Heidegger finds in his summary of the third division

of Nietzsche's history of Platonism: 'The true world, unattainable, indemonstrable,

unpromisable, but even as a thought, a consolation, an obligation, an imperative'

(Nietzsche Ch. 24, 205). Kant inherits Plato's opposition of the sensual to the supersensual,

but insists that our knowledge is limited to the sensual. This is seen as constituting the

radicality of Kant's gesture, and introducing a radical scepticism toward the claims of

metaphysics: 89 'The supersensuous is now a postulate of practical reason; even outside the

89Recently, a comparison has been made between the Neo-Platonist Proclus's Geometry, and Kant's first

Critique, in order to show that both attempt to ground mathematical knowledge without claiming (as

Plato does in the allegory of the cave) that it leads to the supersensible (Daryl L. Hale. 'Leading

Geometry out of Calypso's Arms: Kant's Neo-Platonic Re-Visions of Knowing.' Journal of Neo-

Platonic Studies 3:2 (Spring 1995). 91-121). Cf. also 'Le penseur de la modernité, un entretien avec Luc

Ferry.' Magazine Littéraire 309 (April 1993) [special dossier on Kant and modernity]. 18-22; Lacoue-

Labarthe, 'La césure du spéculatif' 44-45; Mowbray Allan. T. S. Eliot's Impersonal Theory of Poetry.

Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1974. 30. Similar arguments can be found in Nietzsche, The Birth of

Tragedy § 18, 112 and The Will to Power II ii (1), # 253 (1885-1886), 147, Pt. III ('Principles of a new

Evaluation') i (10), # 571 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888), 307 and # 578 (Spring-Fall 1887),

310.
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scope of all experience and demonstration it is demanded as what is necessarily existent, in

order to salvage adequate grounds for the lawfulness of reason' (205). Kant's grounding of

reason recognises the limitations of human knowledge which Plato, so the argument goes,

transcends too confidently. 90 The postulation a priori of the supersensual (which we cannot

know), is described as a 'consolation' by Heidegger, and the disgusting, by Derrida, as

'reassuring'. Kant's system is a system of consolation in the face of the unknowability of the

supersensual. But, once this is admitted, Kant's system is itself highly confident. The only

things which can prevent art from exhibiting the harmony of the faculties (which harmony

would enable it to symbolise the good) are deficiencies of Taste and genius. Deficiencies of

Taste are only technical failings, which can be corrected. But deficiency of genius is not

discussed by Kant. Either you are inspired, or you are not, and once you are inspired, only

sufficient Taste is required in order to console ourselves with art of the remoteness of the

supersensual. 91 There is no description, as there is with Plato, of the suffering which attends

90This argument in fact reflects Kant's own view of his relationship to Plato as described in the first

Critique: Intro., B8-A6, Transcendental Doctrine of Elements Pt. II, Div. II, Bk. I, § 1, B371 n a, and

B375, Bk. II, Ch. 2, § 3, A471/B479, Ch. 3 § 1 A568/B596-A569/B597, and 'Transcendental Doctrine

of Method' Ch. 4, A853/B881-A854/B882.

91I would like to suggest that a similar analysis can be outlined with respect to Plotinus, whose account

of the beautiful in both On Beauty and On Intellectual Beauty, does not envisage that man might fail to

contemplate the One, provided his soul is pure enough. Plotinus, who writes as though he has

experienced the one, is of course different from Kant, who refuses the possibility of ever knowing the

one whose existence he only assumes. Plotinus's confidence may first be observed in his account of how

objects in the sensual world may be beautiful. Unlike the Phaedrus, where the sensual beauty of the

object reminds of the absent heavens, On Beauty ascribes the beauty of objects to their form. In other

words, the matter of the object does not remind us of an absent beauty, but allows the divine to be

present in the earthly as form. Thus, Plotinus argues first that beauty comes to material objects from

their participation in an idea [µετοχη ειδουσ], and that without form [αµορφον] all matter is ugly (2, 10-

15). It is from the idea (equivalent to the Platonic form) that it receives its form in the restricted sense of
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shape (morphè). The beauty of the body [καλον σωµα] therefore derives from its participation

[κοινωµια] in the reason which comes from the gods [λογου απο θεων ελθοντοσ] (2, 25). Bodily beauty

harmonises [συµφωνει] with the beauty which is superior to it just as a house is adjusted [συναρµοσασ]

to the plan the architect makes for it in his mind. If we make abstraction, writes Plotinus, of the material

with which the house is built, we are left with the internal idea [ενδον ειδοσ] of the house, that is to say

with the plan which gave it its shape (3, 5-10; cf. On Intellectual Beauty 1, 15-25). Plotinus here seems

to inflect the doctrine of beauty in the Phaedrus with Aristotle's theory of forms, with the result that the

form is present in the work of art, rather than absent, and that the beauty of sensual objects resides in

their form, not in their sensual being. Plotinus writes at the beginning of his treatise, significantly, that

we can use the beauty of the body as a step [επιβαθρα (as in the step of a ladder or a flight of stairs);

'échelon'] with whose assistance we can see higher beauties (1, 20). Thus, beauty comes from the

divine, and things are beautiful when they resemble god (6, 20). The soul is beautiful because of its

participation in divinity, and all other beauties are beautiful because the soul has dominated or touched

them [εφαψηται και κρατη] (6, 25). The soul and the supreme beauty are "rungs" between the sensual

beauty and the One. And each is in contact with ('touches and dominates') the rung below it. And this

entails the possibility, to bastardise Wittgenstein's Tractatus, of kicking the ladder away when we have

climbed it. Plotinus conceives the possibility of acceding to the divine while we are on earth, and

leaving behind the sensual experiences which made that journey possible. A similar point is made in On

Intellectual Beauty, where it is argued that beauty is a result of the form [ειδουσ] which comes from the

creator [ποιησαντοσ] to the product he engenders [γενοµενον] (2, 15). The mind of the creator is

superior to the thing he creates, as the original is superior to its copy; it is one rung above the product it

creates. This demonstrates another similarity between Kant and Plotinus: both, albeit in different ways,

privilege expression over imitation of the real world. And both articulate this subjectivity to the

transcendental. Accompanying this feature of Plotinus's thought is a suspicion of images. Because the

image is inferior to the original, it is best to contemplate beauty or the One in themselves, rather than

their images. Thus, since all images [εικονα] of the eternal intelligence [αει νουσ] are inferior

[χειρονοσ], Plotinus argues that its image should be taken from intelligence itself [εκ νου γενεσθαι], and

that it should not be understood as image [ωστε µη δι εικονασ] (3, 10-15; cf. On Love 7, 5, On

Beauty 8, 5-10, and the argument that the verbal formulas which express ideas are inferior to the ideas
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themselves in Difficulties (I) Pt. 30). The three themes we have outlined in Plotinus so far - privileging

of subjectivity, possibility of direct access to the divine, and suspicion of the other and the image - are

of course related. The image and the other are both the other of and alien to the eternal intelligence.

They must be left behind in order to be directly in contact with the One. This comes about in Plotinus

through sculpture: 'Go back into yourself and look [αναγε επι σαυτον και ιδε]: if you cannot find beauty

in yourself, do as the maker of a statue [ποιητησ αγαλµατοσ] which is becoming beautiful

[καλον γενεσθαι]' (On Beauty 9, 5-10). By searching in ourselves we arrive at the absolute. And the

process is one of purification: we must shape the soul as the sculptor shapes the statue, carving the

superfluous portions from it, and making it pure [καθαρον εποιησεν] (10). This process of purification

removes whatever is foreign, or other to the soul: it removes any obstacle [εµποδιον] to the unification

of the self [προσ το εισ ουτω γενεσθαι], so that nothing other [αλλο] be mixed inside the self

[εντοσ µεµιγµενον] (15-20; cf. On Intellectual Beauty 3, 20-25 and 4, 10-15). The result of this

purification is developed in On Intellectual Beauty, in which a further process of purification allows the

self to become identical to the One (cf. also On Beauty 25-35). Thus, he who contemplates heavenly

beauty is not a mere spectator [θεαταισ µονον]. There is no longer a spectator who is external

[θεωµενον εξω] to that which he contemplates, because he sees the object in himself

[ορων εν αυτω το ορωµενον] (10, 35-40; cf. the injunction to be a spectacle for another [θεαµα ετερου]

instead of a spectator [αντι ορωντοσ] (11, 15-20)). To contemplate intellectual beauty we must become

identical with it. And at this point inspiration intervenes in Plotinus's scheme: once we are possessed

[καταληφθεισ] by the god, and produce [προφερη] his vision in ourselves, we can represent [προφερει]

our own image [εικονα] thus embellished to ourselves. But it is better still to leave this image [εικονα],

however beautiful it may be, and unite ourselves with ourselves [εν αυτω ελθων], without creating a

schism [σχιασ] in this unity which is everything [οµου παντα] (11, 1-5). This movement is followed by

a movement of separation from the One, in which we become conscious of ourselves as different from

the One (10). But Plotinus argues that we should leave this consciousness of ourselves as different

behind, and return to the One (10-15): to see it as something different [ορων αυτο ωσ ετερον] is not to

be in the beautiful [ουδεπο εν καλω], and we should not see the beautiful outside of us

[ορασισ του εξω], unless we know ourselves to be identical [ωσ ταυτον] to the thing seen [τω ορατω]

(20-25; cf. also 30-35). For Plotinus, it is possible to contemplate the divine directly if we purify
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the simultaneous absence and proximity of the divine during inspiration. 92 The division of

labor between the artist and the divine is devoid of tragedy in the Hölderlinian sense, that is

to say, of anything which might interrupt the reconciliation of the sensual with the

supersensual. Kant's consolation is aesthetic. And however unknowable Kant maintains the

supersensual to be, we are easily consoled of this unknowability, whereas, although

Heidegger says that 'Plato dwelled in direct contact with the supersensuous, as discernible

being' (205), his lover experiences its irreducible absence with a sharpness absent in Kant. 93

ourselves from the other, and this enables us to overcome our otherness in relation to the One. Bréhier

writes that On Intellectual Beauty is a commentary of the story of the soul in the Phaedrus (127-128).

Our discussion, I suggest, has demonstrated that Plotinus bases his analysis of intelligible beauty on the

experience of the soul when it has left the body, at the expense of its experiences within the body. He

takes for granted the negation of the body as negative of the spirit which Plato shows to be at least very

difficult while the soul is in the body. Plato's text recognises that the image is (always accompanied by)

the intervention of the other in the subject's relation to itself and to the transcendent. It is this abyssality

of the image (which Plato attempts to exorcise from his text on one level), which prevents the divine

lover from achieving self-consciousness, and from achieving direct contact with the heavens. That is

what makes possible the detachment of his treatment of poetry from the aesthetic. Plotinus's affirmation

of the possibility of the exclusion of the image and the other, and of the knowledge of the self as united

with the One, identifies him, unlike Plato, with the aesthetic.

92Derrida argues that the concept of the gift of nature, which theorises nature as the originary and

generous source of all ability to give, annuls the gift by making it follow a programme (cf. Given

Time 126-128, 162). Derrida mentions Kant in each of these passages without drawing the inference,

implicit in his argument, that the gift (of inspiration) in Kant as described by 'Economimesis' annuls

itself by the very programmability which returns it to the aesthetic.

93Because of this, Heidegger's description of the Phaedrus, which ignores the tragic dimension of that

dialogue, might apply word for word to the third Critique: 'When we consider very carefully that art, by

bringing forth the beautiful, resides in the sensuous, and that it is far removed from the truth, it then

becomes clear why truth and beauty, their belonging together notwithstanding, still must be two, must
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Kant's aesthetics are an aestheticisation of Plato's Phaedrus. This realisation puts us

once again in opposition to Heidegger, who, as Lacoue-Labarthe's careful reading of Chapter

13 of the Nietzsche in 'La vérité sublime' demonstrates, exempts Kant from aesthetics (cf.

105-108, 113). We will examine this by turning to the third development of Heidegger's

history of aesthetics, which follows the forgetting of the essence of technè by Plato and

Aristotle, and precedes the accomplishment of aesthetics with Hegel. Although Kant is not

named in Heidegger's description of this period, much of that description could apply to the

third Critique: 'Falling back upon the state and condition of man, upon the way man stands

before himself and before things, implies that now the very way man freely takes a position

toward things, the way he finds them and feels them to be, in short, his "taste," becomes the

court of judicature over beings' (83). It is Kant's demonstration that only the sensual is

knowable which forces us to fall back on the state of man. In this new period, man 'freely'

takes position toward things (those things whose beauty he appreciates for example), exactly

like the appreciator of beauty in the third Critique. And even the vocabulary is Kantian: it is a

question of '"taste"' and judgement (or 'judicature' as Heidegger-Krell puts it).

But, as Lacoue-Labarthe points out, there is a reason for Kant's not being mentioned

by name. Lacoue-Labarthe interrogates Heidegger's claim that the form-matter distinction

introduced by Plato and Aristotle necessarily involves a determination of beauty according to

its appearance, or its radiance (Schein) (Nietzsche 80; 'La vérité sublime' 103). One need not

imply the other, Lacoue-Labarthe, justly points out, because Being can shine without being

seen as an outline, in other words, without being conceived according to the form-content

distinction (in which form limits and content is limited). All the more so because Heidegger

separate from one another. But the severance, discordance [Kant might have said 'unknowability of the

supersensuous'] in the broad sense […] is a felicitous one. The beautiful elevates us beyond the

sensuous and bears us back into the true' (Ch. 23, 198).
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himself understands beauty as the luminous revelation of Being. 94 And, in order to correct

Nietzsche's misinterpretation of Kant, he paraphrases Kant's doctrine of disinterestedness in

what turns out to be 'almost his own definition of the beautiful' ('La vérité sublime' 106). And

that definition is again one of luminous revelation: 'Precisely by means of the "devoid of

interest" the essential relation to the object itself comes into play. [Nietzsche's]

misinterpretation [discussed in our previous chapter § 5] fails to see that now for the first

time the object comes to the fore [zum Vorschein Kommt] as pure object and that such

coming forward into appearance [in-den-Vorschein-Kommen] is beautiful. The word

"beautiful" means appearing [Erscheinen] in the radiance [Schein] of such coming to the fore

[Vorscheins]' (Nietzsche Ch. 15, 110; cf. 'La vérité sublime 106-107). 95 Kant's concept of

disinterestedness allows him to come close to a pre-Socratic understanding of beauty, outside

of the form-matter distinction.

Moreover, Lacoue-Labarthe argues, it is within that understanding of being,

according to the matter-form distinction, that Hegel's verdict, according to which the

aesthetic is accomplished by making a thing of the past, cannot be impeached (108-112).

Only by departing from that understanding, as Kant does up to a point, can Heidegger

demarcate himself from aesthetics. Although he recognises that Kant's third Critique is

nonetheless an aesthetic work, 96 Lacoue-Labarthe reads with Heidegger a chain of argument

in the third Critique which undoes the aesthetic. The relation of this argumentation to the

sublime centers on the second example of unparalleled sublimity in the third Critique:

'Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or a thought ever been expressed more

94Cf. the passage from 'The Origin of the Work of Art' cited in 'La vérité sublime' 104.

95Krell points out the semantic range of Schein and its derivatives which Lacoue-Labarthe discusses

here, in his note to Nietzsche at 110.

96Cf. 113 and 114-115 n 28 where Lacoue-Labarthe uncharacteristically disagrees with Jean-Luc

Nancy, on the latter's claim that there is no Kantian aesthetic.

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sublimely, than in that inscription above the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): "I am all that is,

that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil"' (§ 49 Ak. 316 n 51). Unveiling is

a privileged translation of alètheia for Heidegger, and his concept of Dichtung and technè is

precisely that of revealing nature in alètheia, while at the same time not unveiling it: 'The

work presents the a-lètheia, the luminous vac-uum, but of an "obscure clarity", which "is" the

being of what is. And that is what sublimity is' (La vérité sublime' 130). 97 In other words,

although Heidegger never uses the word, his affinities with Kant make it possible to show

that his philosophy is underpinned by the concept of the sublime (cf. 105). 98

Lacoue-Labarthe's valuation of Heidegger is ambivalent. As much as he shows the

limitations of his confirmation of Plato's mimetology, demonstrating that Heideggerian

poïesis depends on the primary mimesis which it excludes, he nevertheless regards the

Heideggerian concept of the heroic (of the sublime) as full of promise. To complicate

matters, mimesis, defined as 'the essence of the relationship which links in a necessary

fashion physis to technè, or which impose technè on physis'99 might describe the sublime,

97'L'œuvre présente l'a-létheia [sic], le né-ant lumineux, mais d'une "obscure clarté", qui "est" l'etre de

ce qui est. Et c'est cela, la sublimité.'

98Lacoue-Labarthe argues that the concept of the sublime is at work in Heidegger's writing, particularly

during the period of retreat 'in which Heidegger obstinately developed […] his confrontation (his

Auseinandersetzung) vis-à-vis Nazism' (Musica Ficta 171/89), in a way which sets up a concept of

heroism which is opposed to the aesthetic barbarism of Nazism, and of which Heidegger's political

writing is a betrayal. It might not be an exaggeration to say that Lacoue-Labarthe's ambivalence toward

Heidegger rests entirely on this betrayal, and that the concept of art he proposes is that of the sublime

which can be rescued from Heidegger. Cf. the chapter on Heidegger in Musica Ficta, 'A Jacques

Derrida', and 'La transcendance finie/t dans la politique' (1981). L'imitation des Modernes. 135-173.

99'[L]'essence du rapport qui lie de façon nécessaire la phusis a la technè, ou qui impose la technè à la

phusis' (Backflap to L'imitation des Modernes).

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which reveals physis in its unrevealability through technè/poïesis. 100 I suspect that originary

mimesis, as it is presented by Lacoue-Labarthe in 'Typographie', is in fact the condition of

sublimity. This brings us back to music. Kant fills in the gap in Plato's account of music and

inspiration, by making Nature the source of the artist's inspiration. This gesture was made at

the cost of losing the tragic aspect of inspiration which points toward an interruption of the

aesthetic in the Phaedrus. Kant's reworking of Plato's concept of muse-aical inspiration is

what makes the third Critique an aesthetical work. But our reading of Kant's concept of

disgust with Derrida showed that music is analogous to the vicariousness of vomit which

undoes Kant's aesthetic. And music, as it is described by Kant, is what assails the subject, just

like mimesis and the sublime in Lacoue-Labarthe. So Kant's writing on music is in the end as

divided as Plato's. It both confirms the aesthetic, in his discussion of nature as implicitly

fulfilling the same role as Plato's Muses, and undoes it in his explicit discussion of music.

This, one might say, is exactly the same movement we saw in Plato: his discussion of the

lover is aesthetic, his discussion of writing interrupts aesthetics. Kant, however, advances our

argument from Plato by explicitly granting the poet the role of Plato's lover. But the

clockwork methodicality with which he does this loses the sense of tragic absence and

suffering as implicit in the artistic work. In Kant, the sense of suffering is not implicit in the

sense of creation, but pushed out to the extremities of the system. Although there is a similar

interruption of the aesthetic in Kant as there is in Plato, it is not as fruitful. We are going to

look in the following chapter at how Valéry develops the role for the poet which was first

imagined for him by Kant, while at the same time reintroducing into their account of art the

tragic element which Kant lost in his rewriting of Plato.

100This point is made succinctly in Michel Deguy. 'Le Grand-Dire' (1984) 31-32. Du Sublime. 11-35.
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Chapter III

INTELLIGENCE

Kant - Nietzsche - Baudelaire - Mallarmé - Valéry

1. Symbolism

This chapter will discuss the formalist poetics of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry (for the

sake of convenience referred to from now on as 'French Symbolism'), 1 and will argue that

they develop from the problems we have just considered in Kant. Two features are common

to the three symbolists: the influence of Wagner (and through him of music) on their literary

aesthetics, and a conceptual framework derived from Kant. As with Kant in relation to the

Phaedrus, no empirical claim is made as to whether any of the three read the Critique of

Judgement (although Valéry does make explicit reference to Kant). I am only arguing that the

conceptual framework upon which their critical writing is based is to be found in the

Critique. Special emphasis will be placed on Valéry for three reasons, the first two of which

1'What was baptized Symbolism can be very simply described as the common intention of several

groups of poets (otherwise mutually inimical) to "reclaim their own from Music"' (Paul Valéry. 'A

Foreword' (1920) 42. Collected Works of Paul Valéry (hereafter CWV). Ed. Jackson Mathews. 15 vols.

London: Routledge, 1958-75. VII (1958) Trans. Denise Folliot. 39-51; citations in French taken from

Œuvres complétes. Ed. Jean Hytier. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1957-60). I have focused my attention on

volume VII (The Art of Poetry) of the English edition of Valéry's works, because it is the volume to

which T. S. Eliot wrote the introduction. 'Reclaim their own from Music' is an allusion to Mallarmé's

reference to 'that act of just restitution which must be ours, to reclaim everything from music' ('To René

Ghil (March 7 1885)'; translated by Folliot in the notes to 'A Foreword' at 331).
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are not very contentious. The discussion of mimesis in the other two writers, particularly

Mallarmé, has already been the object of much discussion. 2

Valéry is also particularly important to T. S. Eliot, who, when he discusses all three

writers together, presents Valéry as in a way accomplishing what is latent in the first two. He

writes that 'the art poétique of which we find the germ in Poe' (which, as we shall see later,

was in part transmitted to Valéry by Baudelaire and Mallarmé), 'and which bore fruit in the

work of Valéry, has gone as far as it can go.'3 Chapter 4 will attempt to trace the way Eliot

articulates part of his ideas on poetry as a response to what he perceived as the impasse of

formalism. Valéry, in whose writing that impasse was principally formulated for Eliot, will

be the focus of our study. More contentiously, I would argue that Valéry's contribution to the

problems raised by all three writers is distinctive in so far as it offers a radical departure from

the aesthetic which the first two seem to (more or less) confirm; Valéry in fact anticipates the

impasse Eliot identifies in him. All this notwithstanding, Valéry articulated his poetics with

reference to Mallarmé's, and Mallarmé his with reference to Baudelaire's (and Baudelaire his

with reference to Théophile Gautier as well as to Poe). 4 Our discussion of Valéry must be

2For Mallarmé cf. Derrida. 'La double séance' (1970). La dissémination. 199-318/ 'The Double

Session.' Dissemination 173-285, and Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta Ch. 2. For Baudelaire cf. Part II

of Given Time (84-172), and Musica Ficta Ch. 1.

3'From Poe to Valéry' (1948) 41. To Criticize the Critic. Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber, 1965. 27-42.

4This is recognised by T. S. Eliot when he writes that 'a book about Mallarmé must also be a book

about Poe and about Baudelaire, and must not ignore Mallarmé's most illustrious disciple, Paul Valéry.

It must be a book about a movement - the most important "movement" in the world of poetry since that

of Wordsworth and Coleridge - and about the aesthetics of that movement' ('Foreword' v. Joseph Chiari.

Symbolisme from Poe to Mallarmé: The Growth of a Myth. London: Rockliff, 1956. v-viii). Eliot sees

that Valéry's poetics, although they are the place in which the theories of his predecessors 'bore fruit',

are indebted to those theories. Eliot distinguishes his use of the word movement from the superficial
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framed by an awareness of the extent to which his poetics is indebted to and derivative of that

of his predecessors, first in order not to present well-rehearsed ideas as if they were original

inventions, 5 and second to identify those areas in which Valéry departs from the received

wisdom of Symbolism.

In discussing Baudelaire I am going to focus on one essay, 6 as well as on the texts

discussed by Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe in relation (respectively) to the gift and to

Wagner. No claim is made to itemise, or reduce to a common formula, a very eclectic body of

critical writing, within which many pronouncements on the arts may be found, some of which

contradict those on which we are concentrating. Only once, to my knowledge, does

Baudelaire refer to Kant. The reference is made in the second part of Baudelaire's meditation

on drugs, Les Paradis Artificiels, 7 within the context of his narrative of Thomas De Quincey's

dogmatism usually associated with it (and epitomised, as Levenson's Genealogy of Moderni shows (Pt.

II, Ch. 7, 135-136), by the modernist movements of which Eliot himself was a sometime fellow traveller

in his younger days): 'By "movement", here, I mean a continuity of admiration: Baudelaire admired Poe

[and Gautier, he might have added], Mallarmé admired Poe and Baudelaire, Valéry admired Poe and

Baudelaire and Mallarmé - and a continuity of development of poetic theory' (v-vi). Only by seizing

these continuities can we do justice to the originality of Valéry's thought. Cf. also 'From Poe to Valéry'

28, 36 and 41-42, and The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (1926 and 1933). Ed. Donald Schuchard.

London: Faber, 1993. 'Clark Lecture # 8' 209-210.

5Cf. 'mythologie blanche' 274-275/230.

6'Théophile Gautier' (1859). Œuvres complètes de Baudelaire. Ed. Y.-G. le Dantec. Paris: Gallimard,

1954. 1021-1045.

7Les paradis artificiels, Opium et Haschisch (1860). Œuvres I, 433-553. The first part is entitled

Poëme du Haschisch (1858; 437-477) and consists of Baudelaire's reflections on that subject,

particularly in relation to artistic creation, and the second is entitled Un Mangeur d'Opium (1860; 478-

551), which consists of a review of De Quincey's Confessions of an English opium-eater (1822).

Lacoue-Labarthe summarises the situation well when he writes that the strength of the 'shock' Wagner's
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life. Specifically, he mentions Kant in the first two paragraphs of Chapter 4, 'Tortures de

l'Opium' ('Tortures of Opium'). The first paragraph describes De Quincey in his mountain

retreat in the Spring of 1812 doing two things: he eats opium, 'And what more? He studies

German metaphysics: he reads Kant, Fichte, Schelling' (508). 8 De Quincey is happy during

that period, after which he suffers as a result of his addiction. In the following paragraph we

are in 1813, De Quincey stops trying to abstain from his habit, and not long before 1816, is

able to reduce his daily consumption by seven eighths. Baudelaire writes: 'It was like an

indian summer of the spirit. And he reread Kant, and he understood him, or thought he

understood him' (509) (lucky De Quincey). 9 We will return below to these strange four years

of addiction punctuated at either end by a different reading of Kant. Whether Baudelaire

himself has read or understood Kant is left open, but Kant's aesthetic doctrine does resurface

in 'Théophile Gautier', and this is significant for two reasons. Gautier, as the essay makes

abundantly clear, represents for Baudelaire the ideal toward which poetry should strive: what

music exerted on Baudelaire was in part due to the fact that Baudelaire had to 'assimilate, all at once, a

theoretical construction for which nothing had prepared him beforehand (Baudelaire knows very little

about the German realm) and which is all the more formidable in that it brings with it a whole

philosophical tradition about which he knew nothing, or very little: through De Quincey, he had just a

few echoes of Coleridge and the "German metaphysics" […] France in general is at this time living in

ignorance of what speculative idealism produced as regards art theory. […] [I]f one can in fact consider

Baudelaire the first French writer to recover something of the original philosophical inspiration of

romanticism, it must be attributed to his own genius, and not to his knowledge of the theories' (Musica

Ficta 37/6). Lacoue-Labarthe later writes that 'the Baudelairean aesthetic […] is, as we know, an

aesthetic inspired by Plato, accomplished by - at least at the beginning - a reversal of the traditional

metaphysical hierarchy (between the sensible and the intelligible and, above all, good and evil)' (62/21).

What we shall attempt to show is that the Platonic aesthetic which 'inspires' Baudelaire is a Platonic

aesthetic already transformed by Kant, particularly so far as inspiration is concerned.

8'Et quoi encore? Il étudie la métaphysique allemande: il lit Kant, Fichte, Schelling.'

9'C'était comme un été de la Saint-Martin spirituel. Et il relut Kant, et il comprit ou crut le comprendre.'
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Baudelaire praises in Gautier is held up by him as a standard for literature in general.

Secondly, Gautier is a role model for Baudelaire in the same way as Baudelaire was for

Mallarmé, or Mallarmé for Valéry: his reading of Gautier allows us to see the aesthetic

principles developed by the various authors as part of a shared endeavour and a system of

beliefs extending beyond any one individual signature.

Kant's aesthetics appear, unnamed, after Baudelaire has held up Gautier's strengths as

exemplary for all poetry (1029): 'One sees that, in the terms in which I posed the question, if

we restrict the meaning of the word writer to the labours which come out of the imagination,

Théophile Gautier is the writer par excellence; because he is the slave of his duty […]

because the taste of the Beautiful is for him a fatum' (1034). 10 In between, Baudelaire, saying

that he is saying again what he has said before, quotes from Chapters 3 and 4 of Notes

nouvelles sur Edgar Poe (1857). We find an unmistakable parallel between the two sources

of influence which Baudelaire puts forward as being most important to him: the theories of

Poe are used to defend the exemplary status of Gautier as embodying the ideal of poetry.

And, as we shall see, Poe's theories (as translated by Baudelaire) are identical on certain

points with Kant's aesthetics. The confluence of Baudelaire's principal influences, in which

he explicitly summarises his views on aesthetics, takes place around Kant's aesthetics. He

criticises the doctrine of the unity of the good, the true and the beautiful, and the creation of

works of art in view of a definite purpose: literature should not be moral instruction (1029-

1030). Quoting from his essay on Poe he writes that 'if the poet has pursued a moral goal, he

has diminished his poetic force' (1030). 11 Baudelaire's injunction is for poetry to be

10'On voit que, dans les termes où j'ai posé la question, si nous limitons le sens du mot écrivain aux

travaux qui ressortent de l'imagination, Théophile Gautier est l'écrivain par excellence; parce qu'il est

l'esclave de son devoir, […], parce que le gout du Beau est pour lui un fatum'.

11'[S]i le poëte a poursuivi un but moral, il a diminué sa force poétique'.

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purposeful ('Poetry […] has no other goal than herself') 12 without a definite purpose. After

quoting from the Poe essay, Baudelaire extends his remark to the question which Kant called

the empirical purposiveness of art. He criticises Michelet for placing 'all poetry, not in

Beauty, but in love' and for claiming that 'A good tailor is worth three classical sculptors!'

(1033). 13 Behind the critique of the bourgeois attitude to art lies one of art as empirical

gratification. Art as the expression of sentimentality is best carried out by the bourgeois,

whose practical skills are best suited to expressing his bourgeois sentiments. 14 Baudelaire

writes: 'The sensibility of the heart is not absolutely favourable to poetic work. An extreme

sensibility of the heart can even harm in this case. The sensibility of the imagination is of a

completely different nature […]. It is from this sensibility, which is generally called Taste,

that we draw the power to avoid the bad and look for the good in matters poetical' (1033). 15

The simple expression of passion by literature is always bound up with an interest, and

12'La Poésie […] n'a d'autre but qu'Elle-meme'.

13'[T]oute poésie, non pas dans la Beauté, mais dans l'amour!'; 'Un bon tailleur vaut mieux que trois

sculpteurs classiques!'.

14Cf. Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis Chapter 13, 'Mimesis in the Theater of the Enlightenment' (164-173),

for a discussion of these themes in relation to the drama which inaugurated in France the kind of work

Baudelaire is criticising here. Baudelaire does not mention the bourgeois in this passage, but he is

synonymous with the 'honnete homme' (1032) Baudelaire does talk about. Indeed, the bourgeois to

whom Baudelaire dedicates the Salon de 1846 ('Aux Bourgeois.' Salon de 1846. 605-607) is the same

character as the honnete homme in 'Théophile Gautier'.

15'La sensibilité du cœur n'est pas extremement favorable au travail poétique. Une extreme sensibilité

de cœur peut meme nuire en ce cas. La sensibilité de l'imagination est d'une toute autre nature […].

C'est de cette sensibilité, qui s'appelle généralement le Gout, que nous tirons la puissance d'éviter le mal

et de chercher le bien en matière poétique.' Cf. Nietzsche, 'The Will to Power as Art' # 814 (Spring-Fall

1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888), 431, and # 815 (Summer-Fall 1888), 431-432 (which uses Gautier as

exemplification of this point), as well as # 837 (Spring-Fall 1887), 440 and # 842 (March-June 1888),

444.
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Baudelaire, by placing poetry under the sensibility of the imagination, frees poetry from any

empirical purpose, just as he freed it of moral purpose in the passage he cites from his essay

on Poe. What Baudelaire criticises in works mixed with definite purposes, in 'the total

confusion of genres' (1030), 16 is what Kant criticises as impure beauty. Gautier's poetry is

defended by Baudelaire with a similar argument to that of the third moment of Kant's

'Analytic of the Beautiful.' Taste, moreover, which Baudelaire characterises as the supreme

faculty of poetry, is placed in relation to the other faculties in what could be a paraphrase of

the Critique: 'Pure intellect aims at truth, 17 Taste shows Beauty, and the Moral Sense teaches

us duty. It is true that the middle sense has intimate connections with the two extremes, and is

separated from Moral Sense only by a slight difference' (1031; my emphasis). Baudelaire's

distinction corresponds to that of the three Critiques, and he maintains for Beauty the role

given to Judgement by Kant, as mediating between the two faculties, and as lying closer than

any other faculty to Reason. Baudelaire's concept of beauty corresponds to Kant's, and his

concept of taste to Kant's Judgement. 18 Baudelaire's concept of poetry is wholeheartedly part

of the aesthetic.

16'[T]he more faculties an object requires, the less pure and noble it is' ('plus un objet réclame de

facultés, moins il est noble et pure') (1029).

17Note: 'The True serves as basis and as goal for the sciences' ('Le Vrai sert de base et de but aux

sciences') (1029).

18On the Judgement and the imagination as middle terms in Kant's Critique, cf. the excellent Eliane

Escoubas. 'Kant ou la simplicité du Sublime' ([1984]) especially 77-78, 81-83, 89-92. Du Sublime. 77-

95. I know of no other attempt to draw attention to the parallels between Baudelaire and Kant's

respective aesthetics, although parallels between both writers in other areas have not gone unnoticed.

Michel Foucault, according to different strategies and imperatives from those motivating our inquiry,

draws a parallel between Kant's Was ist Aufklärung? (1784; What is Enlightenment?) and Baudelaire's

concept of modernity: Michel Foucault. 'Qu'est-ce que les Lumières?' ([c. 1983]). Magazine

littéraire 309 (April 1993). 61-73. English translation in The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New
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Baudelaire's aesthetic is also, like Kant's, underwritten by inspiration. Allusions to

inspiration in Baudelaire, both in his criticism and poetry, are many. The two references

which will interest us here are in his citation of the essay on Poe in 'Théophile Gautier', and

in the first pages of Les paradis artificiels, in which Kant is mentioned. In the first part of Le

Poëme du Haschisch, 'Le Gout de l'Infini' ('The Taste of the Infinite'; 437-440), which also

functions as an introduction to Le Mangeur d'Opium, and the theme of drugs and creativity in

general, Baudelaire describes drugs as responding to the human desire for inspiration. The

states which men seek to create with drugs occur naturally, but are unfortunately 'rare and

transient'. They make the person they are affecting more creative ('more of an artist') and

more happy. They idealise reality, which 'offers itself to him with a powerful relief, a

neatness of contour, a richness of admirable colors'. Baudelaire can compare this state only to

divine rapture: 19 'this marvel […] produces itself as if it were the effect of a superior and

invisible power, exterior to man' (437). 20 This is the standard definition of inspiration. And

Baudelaire describes the transient nature of this state as an 'intermittent haunting, from which

we should draw, if we were wise [sage; also 'well behaved'], the certainty of a better

existence and the hope of attaining it'. Inspiration reminds us of the heavens, as with Plato.

York: Pantheon, 1984. 32-50. Derrida also remarks on a certain affinity between the categories

according to which Baudelaire condemns his friend in 'La Fausse Monnaie', and Kant's Religion within

the Limits of Reason Alone and second Critique (Given Time 165-167 and 165-166 n 31).

19This, as we will examine in more detail below, is close to Nietzsche's concept of rapture, which he too

compares to religious fervour, but also, unlike Baudelaire, to sexual excitement. Nietzsche examines

rapture, as Baudelaire does here, as a physiological condition, as a surfeit of energy and (will to) power,

in which reality is made more beautiful and more simple.

20'[M]alheureusement rare et passagère'; 'Plus artiste'; 's'offre à lui avec un relief puissant, une netteté de

contours, une richesse de couleurs admirables'; 'cette merveille […], se produit comme si elle était

l'effet d'un puissance supérieure et invisible, extérieure à l'homme'.

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The suffering which attends the absence of the heavens is remedied by drugs, by which we

hope, 'as the author of Lazare says: "to take away paradise in one draught"' (438). 21

We find poetry fulfilling an analogous function in the passage from the essay on Poe

quoted in 'Théophile Gautier': 'It is that admirable, immortal instinct for Beauty which makes

us consider the Earth and its sights as a glimpse, as a correspondence of the Heavens.' Poetry

rewrites the world as an eikon. 22 As in Kant, poetry aspires to principles which are 'higher

up'. The division of labor between the divine and the human, and between the poet and

inspiration, is also maintained, when Baudelaire memorably describes Gautier as 'that

magnificent dictionary whose folios [feuillets], [were] stirred by some divine breath'

(1034). 23 The breath corresponds to Kant's Genius, the dictionary to Kant's Taste. But divine

inspiration must proceed through a bookish learning which is directed only at language:

rather than needing to know, as he did with Plato and Kant to different degrees, some

rudiments concerning the world he is describing, the poet must simply learn the forms

through which he will make works of beauty. But although his description of enthusiasm

21'[H]antise intermittente, dont nous devrions tirer, si nous étions sages, la certitude d'une existence

meilleure et l'espérance d'y atteindre'; 'comme dit l'auteur de Lazare: "d'emporter le paradis d'un seul

coup."'

22But here, it must be noted that it is ambiguous as to whether Baudelaire is describing the artist's or the

recipient's inspiration: 'Thus the principle of poetry is, strictly and simply, the human aspiration toward

a superior Beauty, and the manifestation of that principle is in an enthusiasm, an uplifting of the soul'

('C'est cet admirable, cet immortel instinct du Beau qui nous fait considérer la Terre et ses spectacles

comme un aperçu, comme une correspondence du Ciel'; 'Ainsi le principe de la poésie est, strictement

et simplement, l'aspiration humaine vers une Beauté supérieure, et la manifestation de ce principe est

dans un enthousiasme, un enlèvement de l'ame') (1031). This leaves open the possibility that the reader

of poetry is inspired by poetry toward the beyond, but that the poet is inspired by drugs.

23'[C]e magnifique dictionnaire dont les feuillets, remués par un souffle divin'.
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seems to return inspiration to its original meaning of being entered by God (en-theon), the

supersensual toward which poetry points for Baudelaire is more a kind of Parnassus, a heaven

of pure beauty: 'the supernatural regions of Poetry' (1031). 24 This replacement of the heavens

by form is the first important shift brought about by French Symbolism to the Kantian

aesthetic within whose parameters it writes. 25

The haunting of inspiration's transience, which precipitates and attends drug

addiction, is also manifest in poetic inspiration:

It's at once by poetry and through poetry, and by and through music, that the soul

catches sight of the splendors situated behind the grave; and when an exquisite poem

makes tears well in the eyes, these tears are not proof of an excess of enjoyment

[jouissance], they much rather bear witness to an irritated melancholy, […], of a

nature exiled in the imperfect and which, on this very earth, wants immediately to

take hold of a revealed paradise (1031). 26

24'[L]es régions supernaturelles de la Poésie'. It is also however described as a thirst for immortality,

and for a sight of the splendours beyond the grave, both of which almost certainly refer the Christian

paradise. T. S. Eliot argues that Baudelaire's celebration of evil and damnation implied an awareness of

good and salvation which, although not religious, was close to a religious attitude (a kind of negative

theology we might say) (cf. 'Baudelaire' (1930) 421--423, 427-429. Selected Essays. Third ed. London:

Faber, 1951. Pt. VII, 419-430).

25Even though, on the same page, moral and aesthetic ugliness are seen as analogous, beautiful art is no

longer the symbol of morality, but of an otherworldly beauty.

26'C'est à la fois par la poésie et à travers la poésie, et par et à travers la musique, que l'ame entrevoit

les splendeurs situées derrière le tombeau; et quand un poëme exquis amène les larmes au bord des

yeux, ces larmes ne sont pas la preuve d'un excès de jouissance, elles sont bien plutot le témoiniage
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The poet experiences the absence of the heavens as an absence, just as the lover does in the

Phaedrus. Poetry responds here to a speculative longing: to abolish the distance between the

divine and the human, to sublate empirical existence, as the negative of the spirit, into a

higher spirit which contains both itself and its negative. De Quincey read Schelling as well as

Kant, and it is the possibility of the speculative gesture inaugurated by Schelling which in

part animates Baudelaire's concept of poetry here.

The second change made by French Symbolism to Kant's aesthetics is the

introduction of the speculative. French Symbolism makes the transition between the third and

the fourth divisions described in Heidegger's history of aesthetics. Kant's scepticism as to the

ability to know the thing in itself, his limitation of knowledge to the sensual, and consequent

claim that the supersensual is unknowable, is overcome by the idealist dialectic in which

what negates the spirit is aufgehoben. 27 Inevitably, if poetry is posited as the longing for the

infinite (of form) in the finite world, its accomplishment must be dialectic. 28

d'une mélancolie irritée, […], d'une nature exilée dans l'imparfait et qui voudrait s'emparer

immédiatement, sur cette terre meme, d'un paradis révélé.'

27Cf. Mowbray Allan, T. S. Eliot's Impersonal Theory of Poetry 30.

28Of course, Baudelaire richly describes the failure of the speculative, particularly in his prose poems

collected in Le Spleen de Paris (1864). The sorrow which attends the fleeting glimpse of the heavens

and the realisation that he lives in the real world is the subject of 'La Chambre double' (1862)

(Œuvres I, 285-287), the wonderful prose poem. A similar feeling is developed in a Christian and

confessional prose poem from the same collection: 'A une Heure du Matin' (1862) (Œuvres I, 292-293).

The inconsistencies of Baudelaire's critical practice might also be seen as avoiding the speculative

conclusion toward which his essay on Gautier points; one could hazard the interpretation that because

his theoretical pronouncements would seem to make poetry a moment in the search for the infinite, he

never puts them into practice. In 'A Quoi Bon le Critique', he presents the critic's role as that of an

inspired paraphrase of the work he is criticising: 'the best account of a tableau may be a sonnet or an
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Inspiration is, not unambiguously, presented by Baudelaire as a transcendently

generous gift, in contrast with the economy of exchange. In the second part of his 'Conseils

aux Jeunes Littérateurs' (1846; Œuvres I, 941-948), 'Des Salaires' (943-944), Baudelaire

makes the archi-conventional point that the value of literature cannot be measured by the

price of books, and compensates for the material poverty of the poets who write it. In

'Comment on paie ses dettes quand on a du génie' (1846) 29 however, Baudelaire narrates with

some relish the story of a man who had 'the best head for commerce and literature of the XIX

century; he, the poetic brain wallpapered with figures like a financier's cabinet; [a] man of

mythological bankruptcies ['faillites'; also 'failures'], of hyperbolic and phantasmagorical

enterprises' (952). 30 This poet is an excessive spender, whose bankruptcies and business

ventures defy reason, in other words who exceeds the reason governing the economy of

exchange. But Baudelaire then returns him to the economy of exchange by making him get a

rich businessman to pay off his debts, in exchange for letting that businessman be credited as

the author of one of his forthcoming pieces. Baudelaire presents poetry as exceeding the logic

of exchange, as above all exchange, and then exchanges it.

In Given Time, Derrida analyses Baudelaire's investigation of this theme in his prose

poem 'La Fausse Monnaie' (1864; Œuvres I, 325-326), in which two friends give some of

their change (left over from the tobacco bought just before the story begins) as alms to a

elegy' ('le meilleur compte rendu d'un tableau pourra etre un sonnet ou une élégie) (608). Instead of

testifying to the poem's representation of the absent infinite, the critic would disseminate it into the

finite of other works.

29'How One Pays One's Debts When One has Genius.' Œuvres I, 952-954.

30'[L]a plus forte tete commerciale et littéraire du XIXe siècle; lui, le cerveau poétique tapissé de

chiffres comme la cabinet d'un financier; [un] homme aux faillites mythologiques, aux entreprises

hyperboliques et fantasmagoriques'.
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beggar they meet. Derrida describes how the gestures made by the two friends approach and

fall short of the transcendently generous gift. The gift, writes Derrida, must be absolutely

intentional, and at the same time absolutely unforseeable and unprogrammable, in order not

to participate in a symbolic exchange. Giving alms to the beggar forms part of a symbolic

exchange in which the donor is repaid by gratitude and approbation, and therefore is not a

gift. The narrator's friend's large gift then turns out to have been a counterfeit coin. Within

the mimetic rivalry between the two donors, to see who can give the most, the friend's gift of

nothing to the beggar might be an absolute gift to the narrator, with whom the friend refused

the competitive potlach. Again, however, this generosity might be seen as calculated to elicit

gratitude from the narrator; the friend might have actually given more than the narrator, and

only said that the piece was false out of false modesty, thereby invasively forcing his friend

to be grateful to him while defeating him in the potlach. Because the story is fictional, this

possibility cannot be emphatically denied or affirmed. The narrator then imagines the

consequences of his friend's gift to the beggar, and through his speculation envisages ways in

which the beggar might have benefited from it, and thus made it constitute a gift (the beggar

receives something, the friend, having given nothing, is not repaid by his feeling worthy of

gratitude or approbation). These generous intentions which the narrator lends to his friend in

his imagination are in fact a generous gift from the narrator to his friend; the narrator's day-

dream's narrative inspires the friend with the ability to make the gift. But the friend, at the

end of the story, confesses a calculating motive for his act, earning himself the narrator's

reproach. Derrida concludes that the fictional status of the story makes it impossible to decide

what the characters' real intentions or real actions are, and hence whether a gift has been

made or not. This argument, although not fully developed by Derrida, is extremely

suggestive, and we will continue in this thesis to examine how others have conceived of

literature as the medium in which an unprogrammable gift can be made. The gift, which in

Kant, in the form of inspiration, underwrites aesthetics, is at work in Baudelaire's text, and

implicitly identified with literary creation. The exploration of the aporias of the gift in 'La
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Fausse Monnaie' may point toward a suspicion of the aesthetic which Baudelaire otherwise

accepts so readily.

The reading of Kant, you will remember, and a happy experience of drugs, surrounds

on either side De Quincey's suffering at the hands of drugs. De Quincey enjoys the drugs

(which is to say, is inspired, according to the principle announced in 'Le Gout de l'Infini')

when he is reading Kant, can only read Kant when he is inspired. We remember that Kant's

Critique offers itself as a consolation for the unknowability of the supersensual. It seems that

when De Quincey reads Kant he is consoled (of, implicitly, the absence of the divine) by the

drugs. 'Le Gout de l'Infini' 438-439 makes it quite clear that drugs work in Baudelaire like the

pharmakon-paidikos: they remind him (like writing and the beloved eikon) of the divine, and

substitute for it. 31 In the absence of the infinite, poetry, like drugs, consoles us. Gautier is

described as 'introducing a new element into poetry, which I will call consolation by the arts,

by all the picturesque objects which make the eyes rejoice' (1043). 32 Baudelaire's poetics

31Derrida's discussion of the drug in Baudelaire (Given Time 103-107) also points out that it functions

as a consolatory pharmakon, but Derrida's "own" description of tobacco affiliates it to the pharmakon-

eikon with which the Phaedrus confronts us: 'the fact that nothing natural remains [of smoked tobacco]

does not mean, on the contrary, that nothing symbolic remains. The annihilation of the remainder, as

ashes can sometimes testify, recalls a pact and performs the role of memory' (112). The

pharmaceutical nature of tobacco means that the symbol will not be annihilated on the way to the

absolute; there will always remain the ashes, i.e. the trace and the memory. Kant also discusses drugs

(alcohol in particular) as exciting or appeasing the imagination in Anthropologie § 26 471-472/§ 29, 48-

50.

32'[I]l a introduit dans la poésie un élément nouveau, que j'appellerai la consolation par les arts, par tous

les objets pittoresques qui réjouissent les yeux et amusent l'esprit.' Although this is described as a

novelty here, it is described as a principle of the arts of the North (which are synonymous with modern

romantic art) 'the suffering and anxious North consoles itself with the imagination' ('le Nord souffrant et
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oscillate between Kantian consolation and Hegelian dialectic. The pharmakon, or elixir, as it

is described by Derrida in 'Economimesis', was what protected the aesthetic system from its

outside, and we will now ask whether there is any equivalent in Baudelaire to the

vicariousness of vomit which undoes Kant's aesthetics. In 'Théophile Gautier', Baudelaire

repeats almost word for word the Aristotelian-Boileauian-Kantian remark concerning the

artistic representation of the ugly. 33 He also quotes with approval Gautier's blunt remark that

'The inexpressible does not exist' (1036). There is nothing in Baudelaire's aesthetic writing

which might arrest the aesthetic. Baudelaire, as the first gesture of French Symbolism toward

Kant, removes the possibility of the disgusting which in Kant points toward the limits of

aesthetics: he further aestheticises Kant. 34

inquiet se console avec l'imagination') ('Qu'est-ce que le Romantisme' 611). The ideal of art for

Baudelaire is aesthetic consolation.

33'It's one of the prodigious privileges of Art that the horrible, artfully expressed, should become beauty'

('C'est un des priviléges [sic] prodigieux de l'Art que l'horrible, artistement exprimé, devienne beauté')

(1040). In 'Victor Hugo' (1861), the first piece of his Réflexions sur Quelques-uns de mes

Contemporains. ('Reflections on Some of my Contemporaries'; series written for the Revue

fantaisiste between 15 July 1861 and 15 August 1862. Œuvres I, 1082-1094), Baudelaire makes

another bluntly Aristotelian point: 'In describing what is, the poet degrades himself and descends to the

rank of the professor; in telling the possible, he stays faithful to his function' ('En décrivant ce qui est, le

poëte se dégrade et descend au rang de professeur; en racontant le possible, il reste fidèle à sa fonction')

(1091-1092).

34The closest which Baudelaire comes to an awareness of the limits of the aesthetic to my knowledge

(apart from the avoidance of his theoretical pronouncements by his critical practice, on which we

commented above, n), is a remarkable poem, possibly, Le Dantec thinks, to an unknown woman to

whom Baudelaire was going to dedicate Les Paradis Artificiels (but which he did not include in that

volume): 'To know happiness requires the courage to swallow it./Vomitive happiness' ('Pour connaitre

le bonheur, il faut avoir le courage de l'avaler./Le bonheur vomitif') (lines 1-2; quoted in le Dantec's

notes to Les Paradis, in Œuvres I, 1457).

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This brings us to the issue of music in Baudelaire. Music and poetry together inspire

in 'Gautier' (1031), and Baudelaire praises Gautier for obtaining 'the fusion of the double

element, painting and music, by the breadth [carrure] of the melody, and by the regular and

symmetrical crimson of a more than exact rhyme' (1043). 35 In a draft preface to Les Fleurs du

Mal (1861), Baudelaire sees poetry's approximation to music as a means of escape from

imitative and classical conceptions of poetry. 36 But Baudelaire is elsewhere critical of music,

writing for example 'The simultaneous supremacy of music and industry - sign of

decadence.'37 In an unpublished draft entitled 'Peinture didactique. Notes sur l'utopie de

Chenavard', 38 Baudelaire compares Wagner, out of the blue, to the didactic philosophical

artists he criticises in 'L'Art Philosophique': 'Chenavard's is a 'chimerical aesthetic, that is to

35'[L]a fusion du double élément, peinture et musique, par la carrure de la mélodie, et par la pourpre

régulière et symétrique d'une rime plus qu'exacte.' He also writes on the same page that Gautier's

Ténèbres reminds him of Beethoven's symphonies.

36Cf. Leopold Peeters. 'Le problème de la mimésis en poétique' 23. French Studies in Southern Africa

17 (1988). 19-30.

37 '[L'art philosophique]' 931. Œuvres I, 926-934. 'L'art philosophique' is undated, and mentioned in

Baudelaire's correspondence between 1857 and 1866 under various titles. It was first published

posthumously under that title in L'Art Romantique (1869). The title was arrived at by the editors of

L'Art Romantique on the basis of the titles in Baudelaire's correspondence. The essay is a complaint

against morally didactic art, but begins with a generalised complaint against the mixing of art forms,

namely the fact that 'painters introduce musical scales into painting' ('que les paintres introduisent des

gammes musicales dans la peinture') (926).

38'Didactic painting. Note on the utopias of Chenavard.' The same Chenavard is one of the artists

discussed in 'L'Art Philosophique' (929-931). This piece is the first of three drafts which were written

before 'L'Art Philosophique' (cf. editor's note 1481), and only published posthumously in Jacques

Crepet's edition of L'Art Romantique (1925); the drafts are published in the Œuvres as notes to 'L'Art

Philosophique'.
 284

say a posteriori, individual, artificial, substituted for the involuntary, spontaneous, fatal, vital

aesthetic of the people. [¶] Thus Wagner remakes the Greek tragedy which was created

spontaneously by Greece' (933). 39 The last sentence would not have been out of place in

Heidegger, and Baudelaire's critique of the false revival of antiquity is what Heidegger

criticises as the failed attempt to break with the aesthetic. Lacoue-Labarthe's examination of

Baudelaire's reception of Wagnerian opera in Musica Ficta (which does not mention the

remark we have just discussed) however, begins by showing that not only are Baudelaire's

poetics (as we have verified) part of the aesthetic, but part of an aesthetic of which he was to

make Wagner the paradigm. It is through Wagner's effect on Baudelaire, Lacoue-labarthe

argues, that German Romanticism was assimilated by French Symbolism (cf. Musica Ficta

Ch. 1, 68-69/26). For Baudelaire, Wagner's music was the perfect achievement of lyricism,

the expression of pure subjectivity (cf. 40/8). According to Wagner, subjectivity is (like the

music which expresses it) a universal language, so that 'the more subjective [music] is, the

more objective' (43-44/10); that subjectivity accomplishes the metaphysical end of revealing

man to himself (62-63/21-22). And that which is superhuman and beyond representation, and

which is revealed by the sublime capacity of music, reveals man to himself all the more for

39'Esthétique chimérique, c'est-à-dire a posteriori, individuelle, artificielle, substituée à l'esthétique

involontaire, spontanée, fatale, vitale du peuple.' Compare in draft II: 'Chenavard is a charicature of

ancient wisdom drawn by modern fantasy' ('Chenavard est une caricature de la sagesse antique dessinée

par la fantaisie moderne') (933). The fact that Chenavard's utopianism makes of him an 'honnete

homme' underlines just how critical of Wagner Baudelaire's comparison is. Compare also Nietzsche's

remark that 'What Wagner has in common with "the others" - […] the decline of the power to organize;

the misuse of traditional means without the capacity to furnish any justification, any for-the-sake-of; the

counterfeiting in the imitation of big forms for which nobody today is strong, proud, self-assured,

healthy enough; […] excitement at any price; […] more and more nerves in place of flesh' ('Second

Postscript.' The Case of Wagner (1888) 187. The Birth of Tragedy & The Case of Wagner. Trans. and

ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967. 153-197).

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Baudelaire: 'the subject being accomplished - by going beyond itself - as song' (68/25, 74/29).

Music reveals man to himself by inspiring him; in other words, music is presented here as

inspiring without the suffering of dividing the subject. But the lyrical self-(re)discovery pre-

eminently achieved by music is what Baudelaire identifies as the destination of poetry. Poetry

is trying to do the same thing as music, but can never do it as well (48-50/13-14, 68-70/26). 40

Baudelaire develops a formalist poetics from Gautier which functions within the framework

of a Kantian aesthetic. And he lacks anything which in Kant might have interrupted the

aesthetic, as his surrender before music as the accomplishment of the aesthetic - as

represented by Wagner - demonstrates. The marginal suspicions which Baudelaire entertains

toward the aesthetic (cf. above) are left for his successors to develop.

Mallarmé's difficult critical writing has been discussed even more comprehensively,

in relation to the area which we are examining, than Baudelaire's, and what I shall attempt is

40At the same time as Baudelaire recognises the accomplishment of poetry in music as defined by

Wagner (hence recognising himself), he also recognises a challenge to poetry (Musica Ficta 35-36/5,

48/7): Wagner's music is both threat and salvation. Baudelaire's response to this challenge seems at first

one of total submission (58/18, 67-6825-26), but he departs from Wagner at the very moment in which

he describes music's presentation of the infinite as the accomplishment of the aesthetic function. For

Wagner's 'music needs a theatre', writes Lacoue-Labarthe, and his aesthetics are far more

representational than Baudelaire's reading makes them out to be: 'And thus […] his Wagner is not

Wagner' (77/31). He 'Baudelairianizes Wagner', reading the music intended by Wagner as one in which

the self is able to rediscover itself, as the splitting of the self into demon and angel, in which the subject

'finds "half of himself"' (85/36). Behind this lies the recognition - 'beyond Wagner's most explicit

intentions' - that music is capable of signification, that music is in fact a kind of écriture, and it is in this

that the challenge to poetry constituted by music is the greatest (86-90/37-40). This recognition is in

fact that of the interruption of the dialectic and of the splitting of the self by writing, and can be read, in

conjunction with Baudelaire's inconsistent critical practice, as well as his suspicions of Wagner and his

unpublished lines on vomit, as a suspicion of the aesthetic.

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a summary of the relevant aspects of those discussions. Valéry writes of Mallarmé that 'he

believed in all his heart that the universe could have no other object than that of finally

producing a complete expression of itself. "The world," he used to say, "is made to result in a

splendid book."'41 Where the world was lent to the poet in order that he might transfigure it

in Kant, Valéry seems to say present Mallarmé as arguing that it only exists for the purposes

of such a transfiguration. This remark illustrates well what is Mallarmé's familiar formalist

position: poetry is not there to imitate reality but to create beautiful forms. And forms

actually refer to the verse form, understood technically. These forms are the ideal of poetry,

which must try to sublimate the material of its content. 42 This hierarchy of values was also

stated by Baudelaire, but whereas his creative and critical writing takes the reality to be

transfigured through art very seriously, Mallarmé seems more confident in viewing it as a

necessary nuisance. In other words, Mallarmé seems to present a further radicalisation of

Kant's aesthetic. 43 Jacques Derrida's 'La double séance', whose prose is even more difficult

41Paul Valéry. 'An After-Dinner Speech' (1925) 278. CWV 275-278.

42Jonathan Scott Lee argues that Mallarmé's critical writing opposes two different ideals of form to

representation, one ideal of form as self-referential, the other of form as dissemination (in a sense

borrowed from 'La double séance'): 'Par dela la mimesis: Mallarmé, Boulez et Cage.' Trans. Marc

Froment-Meurice. Revue d'ésthetique 13-15 (1987-1988). 295-311. Lee shares the widespread and

mistaken impression (discussed in the Introduction) that Derrida's reading of Mimique eliminates the

possibility of meaning and mimesis (305). Boulez and Cage, Lee argues, each repectively develop in

their music the concepts of form as self-referential and dissemination which are contained in Mallarmé's

work. Lee therefore responds to the Symbolist idea that music is the achievement of the project of pure

poetry, without however taking into account Mallarmé's reservations on this point (namely that poetry

as rhythm is the truth of music, see below; cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta Ch. 2).

43Michel Leiris in 'Mallarmé, Professeur de Morale' (1943). Brisées (1966). Paris: Mercure de France,

1992. 81-82, argues that Mallarmé's preoccupation with verse was far more valuable than the practical

considerations some chastised him for neglecting. This suggests that a certain engagement with the gift
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than that of the writer it discusses, has also attempted to show, through a reading of

Mallarmé's Mimique (1891-1897), 44 that language is originary, and that it cannot be

understood as the representation of a pre-existing content. Mimique is neither an originary

presentation because it is a mime, but cannot be thought of as imitation in the classical sense

because it mimes its own act of representation. This opens up an abyss of representation in

which mimesis can neither be considered originary or derived, an infinite regress of

representation. 45 Mallarmé seems to be presented in 'La double séance' as a precursor of

Derrida.

Lacoue-Labarthe expresses reservations on this subject:

Jacques Derrida, it is true, has shown to what point Mallarméan mimetology undoes,

perverts, and destabilizes all possible philosophical protocols, from Plato to Hegel -

from one dialectic to another that claims to be, itself, the last, the logical

accomplishment of philosophizing itself - of the question of mimesis. [A] stupefying

reading of Mallarmé's Mimic offered the fortune of the undecidable and delivered the

law without the law, the hyper-logic, of écriture. [But] why this strange stop,

repeated, constant, nearly obstinate, at worship (communion), the type, and […]

myth? Why, on this point, the surely elliptical but all the same systematic sketch of a

political and philosophical theory of a "great art" that underlies a declared onto-

underlies Mallarmé's aestheticism, as does Derrida's discussion of 'Don du Poeme' in Given Time (Ch.

2, 56-59).

44The textual genesis of this piece is usefully condensed in 'La double scéance' 222-224 n 14/196-197 n

20.

45Cf. Timothy Clark. 'Being in Mime: Heidegger and Derrida on the Ontology of Literary Language'

1014-1018. MLN 101:5 (December 1986). 1003-1021.

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typology, like all the modern reversals of Platonism issuing, in reality, from

romanticism? (Musica Ficta 121-122/59).

The Romantic reversal in question is attributable of course to Kant. Lacoue-Labarthe shows

that Mallarmé saw poetry as a religious celebration without religion. Poetry was a kind of

Mass, in which the unpresentable unknown was presented. This unpresentable is not God any

longer though, but the essence of a community or a people: 'where humanity, or perhaps

a humanity (a people for example), could recognize itself and get hold of its essence and its

constitutive characteristics, less by "identification" than under the direct effect - under the

impression or mark - of the historial seal that is the type' (121-123/59-60; cf. 106-107/49). It

is in this that Mallarmé's confrontation with Wagner (and music) is centered. Wagner

intended music to fulfil the same role earmarked by Mallarmé for poetry: the sublime

presentation of the absolute. It was in the name of this presentation that both opposed

realism. What's more, Mallarmé recognises that such a presentation is the role of music. But

Wagner, and music understood in its orchestral sense, fall short of the ideal of Music. Music,

in its conventional sense, is mere sensualism, and Wagner's presentation of the absolute

through opera is shallow (cf. 157/81 and 138-14070-71). To this Mallarmé opposes rhythm as

the truth of both poetry and music. The discipline of rhythm is what Mallarmé opposes to the

sensual hysteria of music and of Wagner (1497-148/76). The reading presents Mallarmé as

close, not to Derrida, but to Heidegger. 46 Mallarmé criticises Wagner in the name of rhythm,

discipline and law, in other words in the same terms as Nietzsche, which as we saw are

entirely endorsed by Heidegger. Mallarmé on this reading remains within the Heideggerian

critique of aesthetics, which we examined earlier. Valéry, I will argue, goes further in that

critique.

2. Poetry vs. Music

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Metaphysics seemed to have been destroyed by Kant's analyses. Before us was a […]

blank page, and we could inscribe on it only a single affirmation […]. Our certainty

was in our emotion and our feeling for beauty; and when we met […] at the

Lamoureux concerts, […] when we listened to the whole series of Beethoven's

symphonies or dazzling fragments of Wagner's dramas, an extraordinary atmosphere

arose. 47

Perhaps the metaphysics Kant introduced in place of the one he destroyed constitutes the not

so blank page on which Valéry writes his formalism. 48 And perhaps the writing on Kant's

46Lacoue-Labarthe acknowledges this at 61 and 152 n 26.

47Valéry. 'The Necessity of Poetry' (1937; 1938) 220. CWV VII, 216-230. Cf. Walter Benjamin. 'Paul

Valéry in der Ecole Normale' (1926). Gesammelte Schriften. Eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann

Schweppenhaüser. 7 vols. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1972-1989. IV i (1972), 479-480.

48Jacques Bouveresse, whose 'interest […] in Valéry's thought might well be grounded in [his] response

to French […] philosophy of the 1960s, as [he] felt it was richly deserving of some of Valéry's most

abusive opinions' (380) writes that 'Valéry's view is that philosophizing is exactly what we should not

attempt to do, that philosophy only exists inasmuch as it is not a result of the will to philosophize'

('Philosophy from an Antiphilosopher: Paul Valéry' 356. Trans. Christian Fournier and Sandra Laugier.

Critical Inquiry 21 (Winter 1995). 354-381). There is insufficient space here to point out the many

arguments in Bouveresse's article anticipated by the kind of philosopher he disparages (Derrida. 'Qual

Quelle: Les sources de Valéry' (1971). Marges de la philosophie. 325-363/ 'Qual Quelle: Paul Valéry's

sources.' Margins of Philosophy. 273-306). Suffice it to say that by attempting not to philosophize

consciously, Valéry (one might say "unconsciously") reproduces Kant's philosophical premises. This is

not to treat Kant as what 'historians might name [an] "influence[],"' to follow him 'upstream toward [the]

hidden "sources," [or] origins of a "work,"' ('Qual Quelle' 327/275). Nor is he, as Derrida claims

Nietzsche and Freud were, a 'set-aside source' ('Qual Quelle' 362/305), an influence from which Valéry

actively tried to distance himself. Demonstrating that Valéry's attempt to avoid philosophising is not as

easy as Bouveresse suggests enables us to valorise his poetics as a critique of the philosophical
 290

blank page is inspired by the music of Wagner. Although Lacoue-Labarthe does not extend

his analysis in Musica Ficta to Valéry, many of the things he says of Baudelaire and

Mallarmé are applicable here. Valéry's poetics, 49 like those of his forebears, are anti-

representational:

It is the same with utilitarian language […] this language, when it has served its

purpose, evaporates almost as it is heard. I have given it forth to perish, to be

radically transformed into something else in your mind; and I shall know that I was

understood by the remarkable fact that my speech no longer exists: it has been

completely replaced by its meaning - that is […] by an interior modification in you. 50

premises within which he works, rather than as facile abuse directed (with the intervention of

Bouveresse) at (a certain French) philosophy.

49This term is derived from T. S. Eliot, who refers to Valéry's 'poétique' in his introduction to CWV VII

(viii). Eliot stresses the occasional nature of the essays collected in the volume he introduces (and on

which we will concentrate) in order to warn the reader not to expect consistency or be surprised by

contradiction. What follows may seem to ignore Eliot's warning in trying to trace out a coherent poetics

from Valéry's occasional poétique. However, as with Baudelaire, we shall not attempt to unify all of

Valéry's pronouncements into one theory, but merely to highlight an argument which can be found in

his text. There are contradictions in this argument, and no attempt has been made to hide them. On the

contrary, they are regarded as the most rewarding, and even the most consistent part of Valéry's poetics.

And this gesture is in keeping with the spirit of Eliot's warning: 'Indeed, I regard repetitions and

contradictions in a man's writing as valuable clues to the development of his thought' (ix).

50'Poetry and Abstract Thought' (1939; 1939) 71-2. CWV VII, 52-81. This remark is made as part of the

analogy between walking and dancing, and prose and poetry. Walking, like prose, is only a means to an

end, dancing, like poetry, is an end in itself. The language used to describe walking underlines the

Hegelian premises which underly Valéry's view of ordinary language. In ordinary language, the material

characteristics of language are aufgehoben into its meaning (which is not a spiritual, but nonetheless an

intellectual thing for Valéry): 'When the man who has walked has reached his goal […], this possession
 291

Language 'evaporates' into the apprehension of reality, thereby imitating reality. The 'speech'

that 'signifies some reality' is part of the binary relationship between signifier and signified

articulated by logocentric philosophy, in which language is the substitute ('it has been

completely replaced') for and copy of reality. 51 So, as with Plato and Kant, practical language

is imitative language. Poetry, on the other hand, foregoes all practical use because it avoids

imitation. 52

An alternative view is advanced by Gérard Genette in 'Valéry and the Poetics of

Language'. He argues that both Mallarmé and Valéry distinguish poetry from ordinary

language by virtue of its mimetic quality. He writes of Mallarmé: 'Henceforth there are two

languages in language, one of which (everyday language) is left to arbitrariness and

convention, while the other (poetic language) is the refuge of mimetic virtue, the locus of the

miraculous survival of the primitive verb in all its "incantatory" power' (365). One should

first note that the concept of imitation which, I argue, is opposed to poetry by Valéry and

Mallarmé is different from that which, Genette argues, is associated by them with poetry. The

two concepts are in fact already distinguished in the Cratylus, when Socrates distinguishes

sensual from rational imitation. For Genette, Mallarmé's mimesis is constituted by sensual

imitation, by the resemblance between a word's phonic qualities and its referential content.

at once entirely annuls [annule] the entire act; the effect swallows up the cause, the end absorbs the

means; and, whatever the act, only the result remains' (71; my emphasis).

51'Poet. Your kind of verbal materialism. […] You can look down on novelists, philosophers, and all

who are enslaved to words by credulity - who must believe that their speech is real by its content and

signifies some reality. But as for you, you know that the reality of a discourse is only the words and the

forms' (Valéry, 'A Poet's Notebook' (1928) 183. CWV VII, 173-183). Speech 'is real by its content': it

imitates reality by signifying it and by resembling it, by being real like reality.

52Cf. Walter Benjamin. 'Paul Valéry' (1931) 389. Gesammelte Schriften II i (1977), 386-390.
 292

As we argued in Chapter 1 (§ 1), Plato's rational imitation depends on a prior division of the

real world and of language according to a differential structure (in which one word signifies a

certain thing only because that thing is different from the other possible things it could

signify etc.). The arbitrariness of the sign makes a different kind of imitation possible. It is to

this form of imitation that mimesis in Aristotle's Poetics belongs. When Aristotle writes that

the drama is the representation of an action, there is no claim of any correspondence between

the material qualities of the signifier and the action represented, only that the conventional

meaning of the statements should constitute a faithful description of the action (this

corresponds to the question of whether to translate 'mimesis' with 'imitation' or

'representation', discussed in the Introduction § 1). But, as Genette notes, Valéry does not ask

for the simple sensual imitation we have just discussed: 'The power of verse stems from an

indefinable harmony between what it says and what it is. "Indefinable" enters into the

definition. The harmony must not be definable. When it is, it becomes imitative, and that is

not good. The possibility of defining this relationship, together with the impossibility of

denying it, constitutes the essence of verse.'53 Poetry must attempt to make a union between

the word and its meaning, but not a representational one. This is in no way contradictory then

with the opposition to a certain kind of imitation which, we are arguing, is at work in Valéry's

poetics, but poses problems which we shall turn to later on.

Poetry's refusal to imitate the real world involves finding a space for poetic usage

away from general usage. But language itself is the province of general usage in Valéry's text:

'Language is a common and practical element […] it is […] of statistical origin and has

purely practical ends. So the poet's problem must be to draw from this practical instrument

the means to realize an essentially non practical work. […] his task is to create a world […]

53Tel Quel (1941-1943) Pt. II ('Rhumbs'), 637. Œuvres II, 473-781. Quoted and translated into English

by Harari in 'Valéry and the Poetics of Language' 366-367.

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unconnected with the practical order.'54 Because poetry does not imitate the real world, it

must necessarily create its own. Valéry differs from Kant as to the nature of this other world.

Poetry is no longer an analogy for the supersensible moral sphere; the world to which it

aspires is that of music: 'The musician is […] in possession of a perfect system of well-

defined means which exactly match sensations with acts. From this it results that music has

formed a domain absolutely its own. […] The poetic universe is not created so powerfully or

so easily' ('Poetry and Abstract Thought' 66-7; my emphasis). Poetry escapes from the real

world by attempting to enter the domain of music. Because of this, Valéry is able to

distinguish poetry from the practical order without making it an auxiliary of morality. Music

here is the world of pure forms divorced from reference. 55

I said: sense of a universe. I meant that the poetic state [consists] in […] a perception

[of] a world […] in which beings […] although they may resemble, each to each,

those which form the tangible world - the immediate world from which they are

borrowed [empruntés] - stand however, in an indefinable but wonderfully accurate

relationship to the modes and laws of our general sensibility. So, the value of these

well known objects […] is in some way altered. […] They become […] musicalized

[…]. 56

54'Pure Poetry' (1928) 188-9. CWV VII, 184-192.

55Cf. John Neubauer's argument that the eighteenth century reconceptualised music as being

mathematical rather than imitative. Music's characterisation as expressive (which Neubauer rightly

argues is not opposed to but perpetuates an imitative conceptualisation of music) is challenged by a

concept of music as pure mathematical form: The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure

from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.

56'Remarks on Poetry' (1927; 1928) 198. CWV VII, 196-215.

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The poetic state operates a transformation similar to those operated by inspiration in § 49 of

the third Critique, and in the Phaedrus. Poetry enriches the objects from the tangible world

by relating them to a musical world which exceeds the tangible world, just as the work of art

and the beloved were enriched respectively by the creative imagination, and the memory of

the heavens. 57 Music is what makes poetry inspiring in Valéry's text. And the fact that the

poetic universe 'is not created […] so easily' suggests that music may be inaccessible in the

same way as the supersensible in Kant and Plato. It only exists subjectively as a 'sense' of a

universe, and it is different from the tangible by virtue of an 'indefinable relationship'.

If this paradoxical problem could be entirely resolved, that is, if the poet could

manage to construct works in which nothing of prose […] appeared […] in which the

relations between meanings were themselves perpetually similar to harmonic

relations, […] in which the play of figures contained the reality of the subject - then

one could speak of pure poetry as of something which existed. It is not so: the

practical […] part of language […] make[s] the existence of these creations of

absolute poetry impossible; but it is easy to see that the notion of such an ideal or

imaginary state is most valuable in the appreciation of all observable poetry ('Pure

Poetry' 192).

Valéry defines music here as a differential system similar to language, but which

does not signify anything: it contains 'harmonic relations' rather than 'relations between

meanings'; it is a system within its own domain, which does not refer to anything outside

57Note the economic terminology which accompanies Valéry's distinctions, and its similarity to that

employed by Kant in § 49. The entities which inhabit the poetic world are 'borrowed' from the tangible

world. The poetic world is still dependent on the real one, owes to it the description Valéry makes of it.

The laws of business, inseparable from the real world, supply the terminology with which it binds the

still tributary poetic world.

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itself. And signification, as we have seen, is indistinguishable from imitation and practicality

for Valéry. Music is therefore defined as exceeding the ordinary world. Valéry's assertion

that the signifying functions of language make it impossible for language to function like

music means that poetic language can only be an analogy for the musical world. The poem in

Valéry functions therefore like the work of art in Kant and the beloved in the Pheadrus: the

musical world, like the supersensible, can only be alluded to in its absence by the text. The

poetic world is like the musical world, imitates the musical world by not imitating the real

world, does not imitate the real world because it imitates the musical world. 58 And the

analogon of the musical universe in the poem is form:

Think of a pendulum oscillating between two symmetrical points. Suppose that one

of these extremes represents form: the concrete characteristics of the language,

sound, rhythm, accent, tone, movement - in a word, the Voice in action. Then

associate with the other point […] everything that makes the content […] Now

observe the effect of poetry on yourselves. You will find that at each line the

meaning produced within you, far from destroying the musical form communicated

to you, recalls it. The living pendulum that has swung from sound to sense swings

back to its felt point of departure, as though the very sense which is present to your

mind can find no other outlet […] than the very music which gave it birth ('Poetry

and Abstract Thought' 72).

58The concept of poetry as an imitation of music points towards an idea of mimesis as non-sensuous

imitation, developed by Walter Benjamin (a great admirer of Valéry) in his short essay, 'On the Mimetic

Faculty' (1933). One Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter.

London: NLB, 1978. 160-163. For a recent book which develops an analysis of mimesis from an

implicitly Benjaminian perspective see Arne Melberg. Theories of Mimesis. Cambridge: CUP, 1995.
 296

By form Valéry means the verse form, rhyme, rhythm and so on. These 'concrete

characteristics of the language' are like music, and could almost be a description of it. The

pendulum image institutes a dialectical relationship between form and content in which form,

the part of language which is "like music", music's analogon within language, prevents from

reaching the synthesis in which language dissolves into meaning. The poem in Valéry

'recalls', reminds the reader of the musical universe just as in the Phaedrus the beloved

reminds the lover of the heavens. The poem oscillates between music and signification the

way the work of art in Kant harmonises feelings and the understanding, inspiration and taste.

But Valéry radicalises Kant's position: instead of accepting the link to the real as necessary

and constructive, he yearns for an ineffable musical world of form, divorced from the real

world, but which can never escape the real world, signification and imitation in any

formulation he gives it. 59 A similar subordination of poetry to music as the one we witnessed

in Baudelaire is implicit here. Music incarnates what poetry aspires to, without ever being

able to achieve it. 60 And the longing implicit in Valéry's radicalisation is a speculative one.

59Note that the harmonic relations of music are capable of signification (this idea has been

commonplace in recent thinking on language perhaps since Derrida's grammatologie (Pt. I, Ch. 1, 15-

20/6-9, particularly 19-20/9)), albeit a different kind of signification from that of language in its

restricted sense; the music which is produced by the orchestra is no more devoid of signification than

the poem. Implicit in Valéry's description is that music, like its analogon, form, both exceeds the real

world, and composes with it. The role given by Valéry to music therefore already contains the paradox

which characterises the inspiration which enables the poem to aspire to the condition of music.

60Valéry thus writes that when speaking verse one should not base one's reading on ordinary speech, but

'start from song, put oneself in the attitude of the singer, tune one's voice to the fullness of musical

sound, and from that point descend to the slightly less vibrant state suitable to verse' ('On Speaking

Verse' (1926; 1926) 162. CWV VII, 159-166). Verse lies half-way between prose and song, and aspires

to the vibrancy of song without ever being able to achieve it.

 297

At this point, a reservation must be admitted toward the conclusion of Genette's

argument concerning Valéry. He argues that Valéry recognises that because the sign is

arbitrary, his demand that poetry should use language in a non-arbitrary way is an impossible

one (369-370). Valéry, Genette argues, asks the poet to give us the miraculous illusion of a

union between sound and sense, which illusion is realised by and in the reader (370-372).

Genette quotes at length from the passage in 'Poetry and Abstract Thought' which we have

just read in order to make his point (368-369). He writes 'As can be seen from this last

sentence ['The essential principle of the mechanics of poetry […] seems to me to be this

harmonious exchange between expression and impression'], the essentially intransitive, or

autotelic, character of poetic discourse comes from a harmony between sound and meaning'

(369). But what Valéry is describing is not so much an affinity between sound in sense as a

refusal of the sound to be annulled by the sense, for a remainder, a restance of sound. For

Valéry, the element of sound is the more valuable, and poetry strives to achieve a world of

pure form, uncontaminated by meaning. It is this impossibility which makes the oscillation

between sound and sense necessary.

Within the context of that restraint, the union between form and content does seem

up to a point to prevent the Aufhebung of form, as Genette implies. So the union is a

necessary remedy to the irretrievably signifying nature of language, which, on the face of it

Valéry would gladly do without. The aim of poetry is not, as Genette argues, the union

between sound and sense, but pure form. We are going to attempt to show, however, that

things are not even that simple. The importance of meaning, considered as an irritant which

prevents the accomplishment of poetry as pure form, prevents in fact a dialectical annulment,

but in reverse: the annulment of content by form. The faculties by which the poet deals with

the meaning of the poem, we will also show, are those in the name of which Valéry refuses

the gift of inspiration to the poet. In other words, the content, and all the realms and faculties

associated with it (intelligence, the everyday), are what prevent the accomplishment of a
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certain aesthetic which, on the face of it again, Valéry aspires to. Genette is right to point out

the importance of the union between sound and sense for Valéry. But rather than functioning

as a belief in an imaginary union on behalf of the reader which grants poetic language a

miraculous status transcending ordinary language, I will argue that it in fact prevents poetry

from achieving the status of music, and in so doing questions the aesthetic understanding of

poetry. 61

3. The Formalist Economy

Literature exists first of all as a way of developing our powers of invention and self-

stimulation in the utmost freedom, since its matter and tool is the word, freed from

the burden of immediate use and suborned to every conceivable fiction and delight. 62

In throwing off the shackles of representation, poetry places itself under another set of

restrictions. By subordinating itself to the exigencies of form it can be 'suborned to every

conceivable fiction and delight.' Poetry is purposive, but freed from any definite purpose.

That subordination should be seen as a source of freedom marks a similarity with Kant who

also emancipated poetry from the duty of representation in order to subject it to principles

61This is what gives poetry its distinctive character, and (although Valéry never says so explicitly),

constitutes its superiority to music. Verse 'demands, under pain of becoming nothing but a discourse

oddly and unnecessarily metrical, a certain very intimate union between the physical reality of the sound

and the virtual excitations of the sense. […] [W]e note that in song the words lose their importance as

ordinary meaning, and they do most frequently lose it, whereas at the other extreme, in everyday prose,

it is the musical value that tends to disappear; so much so that song on one side and prose on the other

are placed, as it were, symmetrically in relation to verse, which holds an admirable and very delicate

balance between the sensual and intellectual forces of language' ('On Speaking Verse' 163-164).

62'Memoirs of a Poem' (1937) 102. CWV VII, 100-132.

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which reside higher up. And the freedoms poetry gains from its subordination to music, as we

shall see, are those granted to the work of art in Kant by its qualified freedom from imitation.

Poetry is distinguished from prose by having neither all the same restraints nor all the

same licenses. […] For prose always implies […] a universe in which […] our

perceptions […] have finally to correspond [to] each other in a single way -

uniformly. The practical universe is reduced to a collection of aims. An aim being

reached, the word expires. That universe excludes ambiguity. 63

Prose's constitutional subservience to its meaning implies a uniformity of perception; the

meaning it reveals by perishing is a single one. Poetry's 'special aim and own true sphere' on

the other hand 'is the expression of what cannot be expressed in the finite function of words.

The proper object of poetry is […] [t]hat which, for the expression of its unity, arouses a

plurality of expressions' ('A Poet's Notebook' 177). We can already see the analogy between

music and ambiguity in Valéry's aesthetic: the 'most important properties of language for the

poet […] are […] its musical properties […] and […] its unlimited signifying values'

('Remarks on Poetry' 201). In preventing language's dissolution into a necessarily finite

meaning, music (represented by form) opens the space for an infinite plurality of meanings.

But this has the curious effect of making poetry more truthful than prose: 'Perhaps it

would be interesting, just once, to write a work which at each juncture would show the

diversity of solutions that can present themselves to the mind and from which it chooses the

unique sequel to be found in the text. To do this would be to substitute for the illusion of a

unique scheme which imitates reality that of a possible-at-each-moment, which I think more

63'Concerning Le Cimetière Marin' (1933) 146. CWV VII, 140-152.

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truthful' ('Memoirs of a Poem' 104-5). 64 By 'more truthful', Valéry does not mean 'more

truthful than truth' in the Nietzschean sense, but simply more truthful than a realistic

description. 65 The 'illusion of a unique scheme' is the illusion of representation, the 'possible-

at-each-moment', the possibility of plural signification. And this is 'more truthful' than the

faithful imitation of reality. 66 By escaping its own destruction into meaning, poetry becomes

more truthful than imitation ever can be. This is the result of what Valéry sees as the arbitrary

nature of reality. 67 What constitutes reality is a matter of chance for Valéry because it might

easily be constituted by a different state of affairs. Thus the artificial constraints of form are

64Cf. the doubts Nietzsche expresses as to what motivates the philosopher's inquiries: 'In rare and

isolated instances it may really be the case that such a will to truth […] may participate and ultimately

prefer even a handful of "certainty" to a whole carload of beautiful possibilities' (Beyond Good and

Evil (1886). Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (1966). New York: Random House, 1989. Pt. I ('On the

Prejudices of Philosophers'), § 10, 16). John Neubauer of the University of Amsterdam University

argues that Valéry's concept of poetry as making available alternative possible worlds derives from

Leibnitz (pers. com.).

65This is of course very close to Heidegger's notion of the poem as the rhythm which unveils Being, as

opposed to the descriptions of ordinary language which only gain an empirical purchase on things.

66'Here we might elaborate the motif of a critique of the formalist illusion which would complicate

somewhat what is often considered to be Valéry's formalism. The complication is owing to the fact that

formality, far from being simply opposed to it, simultaneously produces and destroys the naturalist,

"originarist" illusion' (Derrida, 'Qual Quelle' 347/292; trans. modified; cf. also 'L'autre cap' (1990) 99 n

9. L'autre cap, suivi de la démocratie ajournée. Paris: Minuit, 1991. 11-101). Cf. also Pierre Laurette.

'Apaté, Mimésis, Techné.' Roman, réalites, réalismes. Ed. Jean Bessiere. Paris: PUF, 1989. 57-64.

67'There is never anything in observable reality that is visibly necessary; and necessity never appears

without the accompaniment of some action on the part of the will and the mind. But in that case - no

more illusion!' ('Memoirs of a Poem' 105). The illusion is that of realism to which Valéry opposes an

acceptance of the real's illusory nature; in a very Nietzschean way Valéry opposes one illusion to

another.
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naturalised: 'I have often wondered why accepting clearly defined conventions should be

more shocking in Literature than it is in Music or Architecture. One should not imagine that

the will to do so is opposed to what is called "Life." Life itself goes on only in a framework

of terribly narrow conditions'. 68 One example of these narrow conventions given by Valéry is

the fact that the 'hand has five fingers, which I might consider an arbitrary number'

('Fountains of Memory' 267). The arbitrariness of form reflects the arbitrary nature of reality,

thereby permitting the freedom of infinite expression which reflects the endless possibilities

excluded by reality's arbitrariness. So the formalism which enables art not to imitate nature,

in Valéry, is a characteristic of Life, marking another similarity with Kant, for whom the

genius which enables the artist not to imitate nature is granted to the artist by the nature he

doesn't imitate. Music thus exists in a similar relationship to the poet in Valéry as nature does

to the artist in Kant. By imitating music rather than the real world, poetry becomes analogous

with the real world, and the analogy is one between two freedoms. 69

To remain passive, to believe in a story, etc. … costs very little [cela coute fort peu];

and great pleasure and great relief from boredom can be obtained by this trifling

expenditure [contre ce peu]. But the sort of awakening that follows absorbed reading

is for me rather unpleasant. I am left with the impression of having been tricked

[joué] managed [manoeuvré], treated like a sleeping man […] ('Memoirs of a Poem'

117).

68'Fountains of Memory' (1935) 267. CWV VII, 262-268. Cf. 'On Speaking Verse' 160. Compare also

Nietzsche: 'One is an artist at the cost of regarding that which all non-artists call "form" as content, as

"the matter itself." To be sure, then one belongs in a topsy-turvy world: for henceforth content becomes

something merely formal - our life included' ('The Will to Power as Art' # 818 (November 1887 -

March 1888), 433).

69Cf. 'Economimesis' 9.
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Realism, and everything that participates in imitation in Valéry's account, is also a cheap

effect. 70 Its deceitfulness goes hand in hand with the provision of a finite service against little

pay, whereas poetry's truthfulness is accompanied by not only infinite expression, but also

infinite generosity. 71 Underneath this critique we can detect an attempt to differentiate poetry

and its permanent and unlimited pleasure from the limited and temporal sensual enjoyment.72

Valéry writes of his friend "Alain" (Emile-Auguste Charpentier):

70Compare Nietzsche's critique of Wagner: 'He is admired for what young Frenchmen admire in Victor

Hugo, "the royal largesse." Later one comes to admire both of them for the opposite reasons: as masters

of economy, as shrewd hosts. Nobody equals their talent for presenting a princely table at modest

expense' (The Case of Wagner § 8, 173). In a similar manner, he criticises the poets for giving too little,

and describes the poets' sea as selfishly feeding him with a stone when he was hungry ('Von den

Dichtern/Des poètes' 276/277. Also Sprach Zarathustra/Ainsi Parlait Zarathustra (1883-1885).

Bilingual ed. Trans. Geneviève Blanquis. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1969. II (1883), 273-277).

71'All these ['anything human', 'anything fleshy'] are but means […] which stimulate and nourish thought

[…] for, in order that there be light, vibrating energy must strike upon bodies and be reflected from

them' ('Memoirs of a Poem' 121). Although the real world 'nourish(es) thought', thought is like the light

which gives life its necessary energy. The energy dispensed by thought comes from an infinite source

whereas, by contrast, the nourishment afforded by the real world is finite and quantifiable (Plato's

philosophy also valorises light, as we saw in our first chapter. Note also the role of the sun as privileged

example of poetic generosity in § 49 Ak. 315-6, as well as Derrida's commentary in 'Economimesis' 12).

The poet is thus a source of energy in Valéry, an energy which, like the light, cannot be measured with

conventional methods. He 'reconstructs quasi-mechanisms capable of giving back to him the energy

they cost him [qu'ils lui ont coûtée] and more (for here the principles are apparently violated)' ('A Poet's

Notebook' 174). Cf. 'L'autre cap' 94-98 n 8, where what Derrida says about the spirit in relation to other

values in Valéry's text, echoes his description, in 'Economimesis', of the relationship between liberal

arts and salaried work in Kant's third Critique.

72Nietzsche makes a similar point when he complains about being duped by Wagner's 'painted feasts'

(The Case of Wagner § 8, 174), and when he describes the poets' noises [Harfen-Klinklang; 'La
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After a time Alain gave back the volume. But, being rich and more than honest, he

did better than give it back; he could not help adding his compound interest in

capital. Alain's wealth is in thought. He bestows it everywhere. Yet, however

generously he throws it away, his substance always produces for him more than he

can spend [Toutefois, si largement qu'il s'en abandonne, sa substance lui en reforme

toujours plus qu'il n'en peut verser]. In the economy of the spirit, thrift is ruinous; the

prodigals grow rich [Dans l'économie de l'ésprit, l'epargne est ruineuse; les

prodigues s'accroissent]. 73

Thought, like its image the light, is a source of infinite wealth. And, as with the energy

invested in the poem, the more one spends it, the more one gets back. In the economy of the

spirit, an unlimited generosity violates the principles of conventional economy. 74 And this, as

we saw, finds an echo with Kant and Plato. The poet is not the principal beneficiary of his

poetry's generosity however: 'But for [the poet] this speech is more living than for his fellows

[…] [H]e makes precious objects out of qualities of speech to which the majority are

insensitive and which he reveals through his art. He pays back to his country in currency of

gold what he had received in ordinary speech'. 75 The poem which returned more energy than

was invested in it, 'pays back in currency of gold' the ordinary language it borrows. Music, in

enabling the poet to refuse to imitate reality, differentiates him from other trades, and makes

possible a plurality of signification which is a source of wealth that transcends the wealth

created by ordinary trades.

mélopée de leurs lyres'] as having no more reality than the whispering and scurrying of ghosts ('Von den

Dichtern' 276/277).

73'Commentaries on Charmes' (1929) 153. CWV VII, 153-158; Œuvres I, 1507.

74Cf. Given Time Ch. 2, 44.

75'A Solemn Address' (1939; 1946) 270. CWV VII, 269-274

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But where does the poet derive this special ability from? Poets are men, but it is 'the

remoteness from man' which ravishes Valéry. 76 His poetics thus seem to call for the poet to

exhibit superhuman powers, which he can only derive from a superhuman source. 77 Valéry

answers this call by making poetry like the transcendent other par excellence. By aspiring to

the condition of music, poetry becomes analogous with the gods. 'The poet is a peculiar type

of translator, who translates ordinary speech […] into "language of the gods […]"'. 78 The

linguistic equivalent of the conversion of one currency into another operated by poetry is

translation. And the poet's ability is derived from the gods: 'The gods in their graciousness

give us an occasional first line for nothing [nous donnent pour rien]; but it is for us to fashion

the second, which must chime with the first and not be unworthy of its supernatural elder. All

the resources of the […] mind are not too much to render it comparable to the line which was

a gift [don]'. 79 This would seem to lead to the concept of an inspired poet, as it does both in

Plato and in Kant. 80 The attempt to distinguish free art from the limited real world, invariably

76'It was the remoteness from man which ravished me. I did not know why an author should be praised

for being human when everything that exalts man is inhuman, or superhuman' ('Memoirs of a Poem'

125). Cf. Baudelaire, 'Gautier' 1044-1045. Cf. Benjamin, 'Paul Valéry' 388-389.

77'I consider that the essence of Poetry is, according to different types of minds, either quite worthless

or of infinite importance: in which it is like God himself' ('Problems of Poetry' (1936) 85. CWV VII, 82-

99).

78'Variations on the Eclogues' (1953) 301. CWV VII, 295-312.

79'Concerning Adonis' (1921) 18. CWV VII, 8-34.

80Cf. 'For the poet's desire, if he is aiming at the heights of his art, can only be to introduce some

stranger's spirit [quelque ame étrangère] to the divine duration of his own harmonious life' ('Remarks on

Poetry' 215). This is the penultimate paragraph of the essay, and follows a condemnation of the idea of

the inspired poet which we shall examine below. Valéry's notion of the source of the poet's creativity,

which he would not call inspiration, is 'some stranger's spirit', which returns us to Plato's description of
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inspiration as coming from the Other, from a kind of loss of selfhood. This concept of inspiration,

Derrida argues, is also at work in structuralist formalism. Rousset and Focillon (like Kant) think of the

work of literature as creating another world which is not in our world, but in excess of the totality of our

world ('Force et Signification' 17/8). This excess, by definition, is nothing. As nothing, it is pure form

without any content, and it is only this absence of content, which is in excess of all content, which

makes it possible for content to appear in language (form as absence functions here as do Kant's

categories). Blanchot, Derrida writes, reminds us that this absence 'is the very possibility of writing and

of a literary inspiration in general. Only pure absence - not the absence of this or that - but the absence

of everything where presence is announced - can inspire, in other words work, and put to work. The

pure book is naturally turned toward the Orient of this absence which is, beyond or within the geniality

of all wealth, its proper and first content. The pure book, the book itself, by virtue of what is most

irreplaceable within it, must be the "book about nothing" that Flaubert dreamed of' ('Force et

Signification' 17/8). The dream of structuralism is Valéry's dream of a poem without content. And the

possibility of writing such an otherworldly poem in Valéry is made possible by an inspiration, which, as

with the structuralists, is derived from the otherworld of pure form. Clark points out the similarities

between this view and Heidegger's view of mimesis as originary in 'Being and Mime' 1014. One might

however question his claim that'[t]he genesis of a literary text in a movement of manifestation as

effacement is what Derrida calls "force."' Rather, Derrida opposes force to the teleological ideal of pure

form which the movement of manifestation as effacement underlies. The claim that Valéry's poetics are

underwritten by the logic of inspiration has already been argued that by William Newcombe Ince. The

Poetic Theory of Paul Valéry: Inspiration and Technique. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1961. Ince

differentiates between no less than six kinds of inspiration, only the first four of which are related to the

act of creation. All four locate inspiration, not in the otherworld of form, but in the poet: inspiration is

an enhanced subjective ability on the poet's part. Ince's concept of inspiration corresponds to the

subjectivist models criticised by Clark in 'Orientations towards a Theory of Inspiration (with Shelley as

a Closing Example)' 108-109 n 2. The Critical Review (New South Wales) 34 (1994). 85-112. Ince

argues that for all Valéry's critique of inspiration, which we shall discuss below, his concept of creation

depends on a harmony between the personal (inspiration) and the impersonal (technique) (this presents

Valéry as wholly Kantian). Ince concludes that an awareness of the centrality of personality in the
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leads to its association with a transcendent Other, and makes the poet an intermediary

between the supernatural world and the human one. In Valéry, as in Plato and in Kant,

inspiration doesn't just give the artist a work of art, but also the power to inspire and create; it

makes the artist analogous with the source of his inspiration. 81

And the gods grant the poet this power 'for nothing'; endless generosity is a gift of the

gods, and it is from this gift that the poet seems here to derive his ability to make gifts. In

Plato and Kant as in Valéry, the notion of gift is used to designate this association. 82

Inspiration is a gift for which nothing is expected in return, and such a gift by definition

transcends the circular economy of exchange. By analogy, it also exceeds the mimetic

language which is exchanged for its meaning, departs from its meaning in order to be

reabsorbed into it. But it is by definition also something which cannot be experienced, for to

creative process underlies Valéry's impersonal definition of poetry. What we shall argue is that the

inspiration which is necessary to Valéry's account of poetry is not personal, but requires a contact with

the transcendently other world of pure form. It is this which allows Valéry to undermine the harmony

between inspiration and Taste (which Ince calls 'technique') asserted by Kant.

81'If the linguist be compared to a physicist, the writer can be compared to an engineer, which is why it

is good for him to consult linguistics. Naturae non imperatur nisi parendo [Nature can be controlled

only by obeying her] - he must have a precise idea of the prevailing laws of language so as to use them

for his personal ends and to accomplish the work of man, which is always to oppose nature by means of

nature' ('Letter to Madame C.' 172).

82Another point of resemblance which couldn't be discussed in this space was the parenthetical

devalorisation of laughter by the three writers (Republic III 388 e - 389 a; Kant § 54 Ak. 332-6;

'Concerning Adonis' 27-8 and 'The Poetry of La Fontaine' (1948) 248-9. CWV VII, 242-251). Eliot's

main reproach to Valéry is that his criticism 'provides us with no criterion of seriousness' ('Introduction'

CWV VII xxiii). Perhaps Valéry is unable to provide such a criterion because of his difficulty in

appreciating laughter?
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experience the gift would be to repay the donor (with gratitude etc.). 83 Thus the transcendent

generosity by which the poet communicates with the other world, which enables him to

exceed the real world, is the archetype of the paradoxical entity which cannot be experienced,

only thought. Valéry up to now corresponds entirely to the Kantian aesthetic we have been

following. And his valorisation of free feeling against the limits of representation are entirely

consistent with the Wagnerian aesthetic through which Romanticism was received by French

Symbolism. Derrida in 'Qual Quelle' also shows that Valéry's writing on the source 84

describes the speculative desire for self knowledge and self-mastery, for a return of the

subject to its source (the ideal) from which it is exiled in material existence, for self-presence

in the voice with which one hears oneself speak. Derrida even writes that 'Valéry recognised

the immense bearing of this autonomous circuit of "hearing-oneself-speak," […], and he did

so better, without a doubt, than any traditional philosopher, better than Husserl, and better

than Hegel' (341/287). For the purposes of our argument, this demonstrates that an

engagement with the speculative, which we touched on in relation to Baudelaire, is also at

work in Valéry. 85 Valéry, according to this argument, contains both the Kantian aesthetic and

83The problematic nature of the gift as analysed in Given Time stands in contradistinction to Derrida's

claim that the relationship between poetry and economy has 'already infallibly been recognized by

Valéry' ('Qual Quelle' 328/275; cf. also 'L'autre cap' 58 and 64). It is just this fallibility which

constitutes Valéry's greatest insight.

84In some cases, literally sources of water such as Perrier's .

85The texts in which this line of thought is found in Valéry are surveyed and discussed in 'Qual Quelle'

at 330-345/276-290. Valéry describes hearing as 'the supreme sense of expectation and attention'

('Remarks on Poetry' 204). He also writes that 'the soul, when alone with itself, speaking to itself from

time to time between two absolute silences, uses only a small number of words, none of them

extraordinary. This is how one recognizes that there is a soul at that moment, if one also experiences

the sensation that everything else (everything that would demand a wider vocabulary) is only pure

possibility' ('Spiritual Canticles' (1941) 289. CWV VII, 279-294; cf. also 'On Speaking Verse' 162). The
 308

its accomplishment in the speculative dialectic. And the figure of this accomplishment, for

Valéry, is music. Music is the paradigm of aesthetics and the realisation of transcendence.

Derrida identifies Freud and Nietzsche as the set-aside sources of Valéry's poetics. 86

We can, on the basis of our reading, propose a further reason for such a comparison: both

writers articulate concepts of inspiration which are similar to Valéry's. 87 This sets up a

complicated question of influence, because, as we have just verified, Valéry's poetics are

heavily indebted to Kant's aesthetics. This may simply reflect the fact that, as Heidegger

shows (and as our earlier discussion of Nietzsche's analysis of Kant's relationship to the

Greeks suggests), Nietzsche was not aware of the extent to which he was himself in

possibility of self-knowledge is explored in 'A Poet's Notebook', in an entirely logocentric manner, as

hearing oneself speak: 'To end by hearing exactly what one wished to hear by means of a skilful and

patient management of that same desire' is compared to the act of arriving at poetry. The poet's 'ear

speaks to him', Valéry writes, when arguing that the poet exceeds the economy of exchange by returning

more than is given to him (cf. above n). And this gift intervenes in the logocentric economy of the voice

and the ear: 'We wait for the unexpected word - which cannot be foreseen but must be awaited. We are

the first to hear it. [¶] To hear? but that means to speak. One understands what one hears only if one has

said it oneself from another motive. [¶] To speak is to hear' (174). The poet works by speaking to

himself, and Valéry sets up the possibility of an identity between the word spoken and the word heard:

'to speak is to hear', no alterity interrupts the communication with oneself (cf. 'Tympan'). The goal of

such speaking to oneself is logocentric: 'And to imagine is only to understand oneself' (175). But the

word, like the gift which it constitutes, must be 'unexpected' and 'cannot be foreseen'. Understanding is

only possible 'if one has said it to oneself from another motive', in other words if the one who speaks

and the one who hears are different from each other, if the one who speaks cannot programme the one

who hears. Valéry already shows how the gift can exceed the logocentric economy.

86Cf. 'Qual Quelle' 356-358/299-306.

87This enables us to further question Bouveresse's superficial dismissal of the affinities between Valéry

and Nietzsche ('Philosophy from an Antiphilosopher' 359-361).

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agreement with Kant. What I shall attempt to show is that Nietzsche reintroduces into

aesthetics the notion of rapture, and of the suffering which attends it, which is developed in

the Phaedrus and which Kant does not take account of. Nietzsche, one could even argue,

engages with Kant's aesthetics and tackles the issue of the relationship of poetry to music

more systematically than any of the French Symbolists.

Before going on to verify this therefore, the question of why Nietzsche is not

discussed instead of the Symbolist writers who are so similar to him, must be dealt with. I

will be discussing Valéry in the light of Nietzsche rather than the other way around, because

Valéry pursues the aporias of his (and Nietzsche's) position further. Nietzsche gives a more

explicit account of the relationship of his position to the philosophical tradition, where

Valéry seems (like Eliot) to see his position as wholly unrelated to tradition. But Valéry is

more suggestive, I would argue, as to the possibilities raised for poetry by his arguments,

whereas Nietzsche's account is more theoretical, focusing on the value of art in general as

opposed to other philosophical values. Nietzsche, in other words, is more aesthetic than

Valéry. That is not to say that there is not a movement away from the aesthetic in Nietzsche

similar to that in Valéry. Such a gesture corresponds, in Nietzsche, to the movement away

from the privilege given to the Dionysian over the Apollinian in The Birth of Tragedy, toward

the privilege of the Apollinian over the Dionysian in The Will to Power (the break with

Wagner is the touchstone for this change of position). 88 The equivalent of this opposition in

88Lacoue-Labarthe writes that in the Birth, 'the Apollinian is everywhere thought as the second degree

minimèma of the Dionysian' ('l'apollinien est partout pensé comme un minimème au second degré du

dionysiaque') ('L'antagonisme' 127), but that in the Will to Power 'there was, in the Apollonian […]

something to resist the dubious, and finally decadent, charm of the aestheticizing dissolution to which

the emphatic velleities of a "great art" led. And the rupture [with Wagner] attests to this: Nietzsche was

this resistance - which we would call "figural" - to Dionysiac complacency and to affective abandon'

(Musica Ficta 196/104). The law which both Nietzsche (in The Will to Power) and Heidegger (in
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Valéry is, on one hand, his submission before music as the supreme art, together with the

logic of inspiration which guides his poetics (Wagner, the Dionysian), and, on the other hand,

the rejection of inspiration in the name of intelligence (the Apollinian). I will suggest that

Valéry makes this break more decisively than Nietzsche. This may seem contentious; whether

it is justified or not may be judged from the argument below. 89

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy identifies music and the Dionysian as the truth of

tragedy, which returns us, one last time, to the Phaedrus. Two remarks by Socrates look

forward to Nietzsche: 1. 'I am not yet capable, in accordance with the Delphic inscription, of

"knowing myself"' (229 e), and 2. his list of the four kinds of divine inspiration, 'taking the

madness of the seer as Apollo's inspiration, that of mystic rites as Dionysius', poetic madness,

for its part, as the Muses', and the fourth as that belonging to Aphrodite and to Love' (265 b).

Like Nietzsche, Socrates associates inspiration with the annulment of the principium

individuationis; when praising inspiration, he does not know himself, thereby distinguishing

himself from the Apollinian as defined by Nietzsche. And the Dionysian and Apollinian

constitute the two lower forms of inspiration of which erotic and poetic inspiration are

presented as the truth. 90 Turning to The Birth, we find an unwitting reference to the

Nietzsche) oppose to Wagner and aesthetics, opposes the Dionysian with and in the name of the

Apollinian. Baudelaire's ambiguous attitude toward Wagner of course anticipates Valéry here.

89I might also add that as we shall be pursuing our argument in relation to T. S. Eliot, it makes sense to

focus on Valéry, in whom Eliot read the concepts whose history we are following.

90Nietzsche comments on this same passage without acknowledging the Phaedrus as its source, or the

fact that Plato mentions the Dionysian and Apollinian in it: Euripides 'might have said that Aeschylus,

because he created unconsciously, did what was wrong. The divine Plato, too, almost always speaks

only ironically of the creative faculty of the poet, insofar as it is not conscious insight, and places it on

a par with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter [my emphasis]: the poet is incapable of

composing until he has become unconscious and bereft of understanding' (§ 13, 85-86). This remark
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Phaedrus. In praising Dionysian madness at the expense of a scientific rationalism which is

not dissimilar to the miserly benefits of the non-lover's mortal good sense and moderation in

the Phaedrus, Nietzsche writes 'Should it not have been madness, to use one of Plato's

phrases, that brought the greatest blessings upon Greece?', 91 which reference can be traced to

Phaedrus 244 a: 'the greatest of goods come to us through madness'. 92

Dionysian ecstasy as described in The Birth corresponds closely to the growth of the

inspired lover's wings in the Phaedrus: 'We are pierced by the maddening sting of these pains

just when we have become, as it were, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and

when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy' (§ 17,

104-105). The Dionysian art, in the Birth of Tragedy, is music: the 'Dionysian artist has

identified himself with the primal unity, its pain and contradiction. Assuming that music has

endorses - and might have been cited in our first chapter with - both Edith Hamilton's remark that Plato

is amusing himself in the Ion (§ 5 ), and Nietzsche's own remark that Socrates is bent on destroying

myths (§ 7 n). It also makes a straightforward mistake in speaking of 'the dream interpreter and

soothsayer' (both Apollinian), where Socrates speaks of the seer (Apollo) and mystic rites (Dionysius) -

thereby leaving out the inspiration attributed by Plato to Dionysius; it also fails to realise that Plato

places the poet's inspiration above the dream interpreter's in the Phaedrus. Nietzsche's account of

Plato's attitude to inspiration is accurate however, as we have seen, in relation to a certain strand in

Plato's text, exemplified by Laws IV, 719 c. But we also saw that in the Phaedrus Plato exalts the same

unconscious inspiration, and takes the same poetic creativity seriously. Although the first part of

Nietzsche's remark we have just quoted corresponds to the view of the poet in Laws IV, the second

('and places it on a par …') refers to the Phaedrus; Nietzsche conflates the devalorisation of the poet in

Laws IV with his rehabilitation in the Phaedrus. Or rather, he cannot recognise this rehabilitation, or the

fact that his critique of Platonism is anticipated in Plato's Phaedrus (Nietzsche remarks (ironically) on

the affinities between Plato and Dionysius in Beyond Good and Evil I, § 7).

91'Attempt at a Self-Criticism' (1886) 21. The Birth of Tragedy 17-27.

92Lacoue-Labarthe cites a similar remark in Dawn § 14 ('Typographie' 168-169).

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been correctly termed a repetition and a recast of the world, we may say that he produces the

copy of this primal unity as music' (§ 5, 49). Music imitates the world, and imitates a primal

unity. These two statements become coherent if we understand that there is a world of music

which is superior and anterior to the empirical world: 'music […] gives the inmost kernel

which precedes all forms, or the heart of things' (§ 16, 102). As in Valéry, the world of music

is superior to the empirical one, and holds an analogous place to the divine world in the

Phaedrus. Music also inspires: 'the rapture of the Dionysian state' involves an 'annihilation of

the ordinary bounds and limits of existence' (§ 7, 59; cf. also § 8, 62). In 'The Will to Power

as Art', Nietzsche, without ever explicitly describing the artist as inspired, describes, in more

detail than in The Birth of Tragedy, an artistic state which is very similar to the inspiration of

the divine lover in the Phaedrus. 93 The aesthetic state is characterised by intoxication,

extreme sharpness of the senses, and the compulsion to imitate (# 811 (March-June 1888),

428-429). Intoxication is similar to the Dionysian ecstasy, and consists in a feeling of

enhanced power. 94 The sharpness of the senses give the artist a surplus of energy - 'a

93Cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche Ch. 14: 'Rapture as an Aesthetic State'. Heidegger's account of (Nietzsche's

account of) inspiration raises similar questions to the theories of inspiration critiqued by Clark in

'Towards a Theory of Inspiration'. Rapture, writes Heidegger, is an 'embodying attunement', which

conducts Dasein 'into the plenitude of its capacities, which mutually arouse one another and foster

enhancement' (105). While Heidegger attempts to distinguish his account from any naïve concept of

subjectivity, by insisting that the state of rapture is an attribute of Dasein, and not located '"in" the body

and "in" the psyche' (105), he still defines it as an enhancement of abilities; in other words, the criterion

for inspiration is qualitative, and depends on our criterion for judging whether a given work testifies to

enhanced abilities. This potentially makes Heidegger's definition circular (is inspired what is enhanced,

is enhanced what is inspired). The problems attaching to Heidegger's concept of inspiration as

enhancement are analogous, one might suggest, to those attaching to his concept of greatness (cf. the

discussion of Auseinandersetzung above, Ch. 1, Exergue).

94Nietzsche compares this state to drunkenness and sexual arousal in # 800, with which Plato also

compares divine love in the Phaedrus.

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compulsion and urge to get rid of the exuberance of inner tension'. And, as in Platonic

inspiration, the artist loses control of himself as a result of this: 'as extreme irritability

through which a given example becomes contagious - a state is divined on the basis of signs

and immediately enacted' (429). This is similar to the Ion, in which the inspired poet loses

control of himself, and inspires a similar loss of control in others (Nietzsche here implicitly

raises the issue of the relation of imitation and inspiration).

The most interesting similarity with the Phaedrus (and with Valéry) is the fact that

the artistic state makes the artist give: 'This is what distinguishes the artist from laymen

(those susceptible to art): the latter reach the high point of their susceptibility when they

receive; the former as they give - […] [T]he perspectives of these two states are opposite',

and the artist 'ought not to look back, he ought not to look at all, he ought to give' (429). 95

Intoxication, like inspiration in the Phaedrus, involves giving without receiving. It is

therefore not surprising to find an account of love in 'The Will to Power as Art' analogous to

that in the Phaedrus:

The lover becomes a squanderer: he is rich enough for it. Now he dares, becomes an

adventurer, becomes an ass in magnanimity and innocence; he believes in God again,

he believes in virtue, because he believes in love; and on the other hand, this happy

idiot grows wings and new capabilities, and even the door of art is opened to him (#

808 (March-June 1888), 427; my emphasis).

Love makes the lover grow wings (Nietzsche says ironically), just as it did in the Phaedrus.

And it is love, here as in the Phaedrus, which grants the possibility to give without reserve

95Cf. # 801 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888), 422 and # 802 (Spring-Fall 1887), 422.
 314

which distinguishes inspired creation from the economics of exchange. 96 The Dionysian as

inspiration of the artist in The Birth of Tragedy is developed in 'The Will to Power as Art'

into a concept of love and intoxication which is analogous with the divine erotic inspiration

of the Phaedrus. 97

96Love also idealises the beloved (# 806 (1883-1888), 424-425 and # 807 (Summer-Fall 1888), 425-

426), and gives the artist the same surfeit of energy as intoxication (# 805 (1883-1888), 424).

97Nietzche's use of 'pathos' in The Birth of Tragedy demonstrates a certain awareness of what might be

at stake in that word. On one hand he devalorises pathos in modern opera as being part of the drama, as

opposed to the music, in other words as contributing to the presentation of music as the assistant of

drama (whereas Nietzsche of courses thinks it should be the other way around) (§ 19, 114). But he also

writes that for the ancients, 'the deepest pathos was […] merely aesthetic play' (§ 22, 132). Pathos is

identified here as the Dionysian, which is represented in Apollinian aesthetic play. In the Case of

Wagner, he describes Wagner's pathos as a tasteless emotional expression, similar to the pathos

criticised in modern opera (§ 8, 172). Such emotional stimulation is described by Nietzsche as the

debasing of the Dionysian ecstasy (cf. Birth § 12, 83): pathos seems to designate both the Dionysian

and its Euripidean debasement in Nietzsche. This is exemplified by Nietzsche's criticism of Euripides,

in whose plays 'Everything laid the ground for pathos, not for action: and whatever was not directed

toward pathos was considered objectionable. But what interferes most with the hearer's pleasurable

absorption in such scenes is any missing link, any gap in the texture of the background story' (§ 12, 84).

This is a similar criticism to that of modern opera: pathos derives from the story and the emotions it

expresses, and depends essentially on the story being told clearly, on the words being understood etc.

By the time he wrote The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche considered Wagner to be the chief exponent of the

view of music as 'ancilla dramaturgica' ('The Will to Power as Art' # 838 (1888), 441). It is in that spirit

that he criticises Wagner for being an actor, and envisaging the drama as action: 'It has been a real

misfortune for aesthetics that the word drama has been translated "action" [Handlung]. […] Ancient

drama aimed at pathos - it precluded action (moving it before the beginning or behind the scene). The

word drama is of Doric origin, and according to Doric usage it means "event," "story" - both words in

the hieratic sense. The most ancient drama represented the legend of the place, the "holy story" on

which the foundation of the cult rested (not a doing but a happening: dran in Doric actually does not
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In terms which are remarkably similar to those employed by Valéry, Nietzsche writes

that the poem is an imitation of music: 'the word, the image, the concept here seeks an

expression analogous to music and now feels in itself the power of music' (Birth § 6, 54). 98

Now, although Nietzsche opposes the tragedy which is inspired by Dionysian music to the

drama which, influenced by the Socratic and scientific spirit, merely imitates empirical

reality, 99 the aesthetic which he opposes to naturalism is itself still imitative. As we saw,

music is an imitation of the primal unity of nature. And the Dionysian ecstasy is transmitted

by imitation: 100 the tragedy's chorus is an 'artistic imitation' of 'the votaries of Dionysus' (i.e.

the Satyrs themselves) (§ 8, 62), whose ecstasy is communicated to the multitude via the

mean to "do"' (§ 9, 174 n*). The pathos that Nietzsche criticises in Euripides (and later in Wagner) is

praised in ancient drama. And what is praised is something which, for all Nietzsche's valorisation of

will and activity, approaches the idea of passive creation which we outlined above in Ch. 1 (§ 6).

Ancient Greek drama is, like inspiration in the Phaedrus, an event or a happening, not an action.

Nietzsche argues that it takes place, without being the action of any subject. And like inspiration in the

Phaedrus it is linked to a sacred place. To the false pathos of Wagner and Euripides, Nietzsche opposes

the outline of an authentic passivity which looks back to the Phaedrus.

98Nietzsche makes a similar remark in 'The Will to Power as Art': 'Compared with music all

communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make

the uncommon common' (# 810 (Spring-Fall 1887), 428).

99Cf. inter alia The Birth of Tragedy § 12, 83, § 17, 108, § 24, 140.

100Both the Dionysian and the Apollinian are, for Nietzsche, imitations of nature in its creative power

(natura naturans), not in its phenomenal appearance (§ 2, 38), just as in Kant, the poet imitates nature's

freedom by not imitating her products. Cf. Mark P. Drost. 'Nietzsche and Mimesis.' Philosophy and

Literature 10:2 (October 1986). 309-317, for a nimble discussion of these issues in relation to The Birth

of Tragedy, which however does not take into account either the Heideggerian or deconstructive

readings of Nietzsche.
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chorus (64). 101 And poetry imitates music: 'we may regard imitative poetry as the imitative

fulguration of music in images and concepts' (§ 6, 55). Valéry's replacement of imitation of

reality by an imitation of music thus closely follows Nietzsche's, which itself closely follows

the Phaedrus, behind the vagueness of Nietzsche's allusions to that dialogue. The imitation of

music by poetry also describes the relationship between the Apollinian and Dionysian in

Nietzsche's concept of tragedy. Continuing from where we broke off our last quotation from §

5, we find that 'Now, however, under the Apollinian dream inspiration, this music reveals

itself to him again as a symbolic dream image' (§ 5, 49). The Apollinian represents Dionysian

music as a dream image. For all the obvious differences between Kant and Nietzsche, the

division of labor between the two tragic tendencies is analogous to that between Genius and

Taste. The Apollinian, like Taste, represents reality, and is charged with realising the infinite

rapture of the Dionysian Genius. 102

101Nietzsche, for that part accurately, dismisses the Ion in a wholesale manner as presenting poetry as

emotional stimulation. But the epidemic spread of inspiration in The Birth § 8, 14, from its absolute

source to the spectators through the Satyrs and the chorus, is analogous to the rhapsode's inspiration in

the Ion 533 d-e (which proceeds from the muses to the audience via the poet and the rhapsode).

102Freud locates the source of inspiration in the unconscious, which gesture is very close to the source

of poetic creativity which Valéry opposes to inspiration: 'The idea of inspiration, if one holds to this

naïve image of a foreign gust [Plato's epipnoian], or of an all-powerful soul, substituted all of a sudden

for a while for our own, can suffice for the ordinary mythology of the things of the spirit. […] But I

can't manage to understand that one should not seek to descend into oneself as profoundly as possible'

('L'idée de l'inspiration, si l'on se tient à cette image naïve d'un souffle étranger, ou d'une ame toute-

puissante, substituée tout à coup pour un temps à la notre, peut suffire à la mythologie ordinaire des

choses de l'esprit. […] Mais je ne puis arriver à comprendre que l'on ne cherche pas à descendre dans

soi-meme le plus profondément qu'il soit possible' (Letter published in le Capitole (1918; 1926)/ quoted

in the notes to Charmes in Œuvres I, 1644-1645). 'As deeply into oneself as possible' is where Freud

locates the unconscious, although, as Derrida shows, Valéry explicitly rejects any such psychoanalytical

interpretation.
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And it is here that the mirror once again makes its appearance. The Apollinian gives

an idealised, aestheticised image of the world: in order that the ancient Greek might endure

the suffering which Dionysian insight reveals at the heart of existence, 'he had to interpose

between himself and life the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians' (§ 3, 42), of which he

'made use of as a transfiguring mirror' (43). That mirror works like art in the Aristotelian-

Bouileauian-Kantian-Romantic conception: it makes the ugly beautiful, it makes suffering

bearable, horror contemplatable etc. Apollinian art functions like a pharmakon. And when

everyday reality re-enters consciousness, after our Dionysian transports, it is experienced as

nausea (§ 7, 59-60). Having witnessed the Dionysian insight during his enraptured state, the

once inspired man sees the world as futile. It is at this point that art saves him:

Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress,

expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous [Ekelgedanken]

thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can

live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the

artistic discharge of the nausea [Ekel] of absurdity (60). 103

103German text cited from Die Geburt der Tragödie. Nietzsche Werke. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino

Montinari. 8 vols. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1967-1997. III i (1972), 3-152. The question of

the pharmakon surfaces frequently in Nietzsche's writing. Two remarks show an awareness of the dual

nature of the pharmakon which troubled Plato: the statement that medicine reminds us of deadly

poisons (Birth of Tragedy § 2, 40), and that someone who accepted 'the doctrine of the derivation of all

good impulses from wicked ones', and who accepted those impulses as being essential to the 'general

economy of life', would 'suffer from such a view of things as from seasickness' (Beyond Good and

Evil Pt. I, § 23, 31). He regards the difference between Greek tragedy and its modern Euripidean

debasement as the difference between the pharmakon as poison and the pharmakon as remedy:

optimistic opera makes the spectator 'call out, nauseated: Away with the phantom!' (Nietzsche describes
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The intrusion of reality nauseates just like the disgusting in Kant. The idealising distance of

Apollinian art functions exactly like the sublime and all other recuperations of the negative in

Kant's aesthetic. But, as in Kant and in Plato, there are two deinon experiences from which

art protects us. The first is the absence which follows rapture, the second is the unmediated

Dionysian inspiration itself (rather than its absence): 'Suppose a human being has put his ear,

as it were, to the heart chamber of the world will and felt the roaring desire for existence

pouring from there into all the veins of the world […]? How could he endure to perceive the

innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe […] enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the

human individual, without inexorably fleeing toward his primordial home' (§ 21, 127; my

opera as a specter and a parasite on true art) (§ 19, 118), while tragedy is described as a potion for the

Greeks in their war against the Persians (§ 21, 124; cf. also 'The Will to Power' # 851 (January-Fall

1888), 449). Elsewhere, Nietzsche claims to have possessed a charm with which to understand tragedy

(§ 16, 101), describes the faith in scientific knowledge as a false panacea (§ 17, 106), and the scientific,

Apollinian and Dionysian cultures as three different stimulants (§ 18, 110). Throughout the Case of

Wagner, Nietzsche condemns Wagner, who embodied the revival of "healthy" tragedy in The Birth of

Tragedy, for being both a poison and a false remedy. Wagner is thus called an enchanter (§ 3, 160), in

whose operas the Indian Circe beckons (§ 4, 164), described as a sickness (§ 5, 164), and compared to

the invented disease 'Rhinoxera' (Second Postscript 186). His music sickens and falsely stimulates

weary nerves (§ 5, 165-166), and is described as a philter of sickness, hieratic aromas and small

infinities, which obstructs the stomach like alcohol (Postscript 184). Nietzsche even compares Bayreuth

to cold water therapy, and asks what a doctor would make of Wagnerian woman (Postscript, 185).

Zarathustra, identifying himself with the poets and referring to them as 'we', says that they ('we') have

'prepared venomous mixtures [giftiger Mischmasch]' and perpetrated indescribable/unnameable

[Unbeschreibliche] things in their cellars' ('Von den Dichtern' 274/275). Lacoue-Labarthe also shows

that Nietzsche regards history as a pharmakon in the second of the Untimely Meditations ('Histoire et

mimèsis' 90-93).
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emphasis). 104 The individual cannot endure direct contact with the Dionysian, just as he

cannot endure direct sight of the divine: it would be too deinon. The listener is protected by

the Apollinian: 'Between the universal validity of its music and the listener, receptive in his

Dionysian state, tragedy places a sublime parable, the myth, and deceives the listener into

feeling that the music is merely the highest means to bring life into the vivid world of the

myth' (126; my emphasis). 105 The mirror and the pharmakon, both figures of mimesis, are the

104Cf. Phaedrus 250 c.

105There is something Apollinian about verse as described by Valéry in comparison with song. Valéry

suggests that it is in the restraint which it exercises toward form, music and (as we shall see) inspiration,

that verse is superior to song: 'Poetry is not music; still less is it speech. It is perhaps this ambiguity that

makes its delicacy. One might say that it is about to sing, rather than that it sings; and that it is about to

speak, rather than it speaks' ('Letter to Madame C. [Claire Connolly b. 1882]' (1928) 167. CWV 167-

168). This clearly recalls the pendulum image: poetry is about to sing or speak, but never does; it never

swings all the way to form or to meaning. And rather than regret its refusal to do so as a failure (as he

did in 'Poetry and Abstract Thought'), Valéry regards it as the 'ambiguity that makes its delicacy'.

Poetry's delicacy resides in its failure to achieve music and pure poetry. And this delicacy is made

possible by restraint: 'I wanted to make trial of a voice which […] would descend from the full and

complete melody of musicians to our poets' melody, which is restrained and tempered' (168; my

emphasis). Poetry distinguishes itself from the (Dionysian) art of music with (Apollinian) restraint and

temperance. Behind the modesty of Valéry's envy of music, of his description of poetry as a humble art

('It dare not sound too loud nor speak too clearly. It haunts neither the heights nor the depths of the

voice. It is contented with the hills and with a very modest skyline' (169)), lies an assertion of the

superiority of poetry over other art forms. This enables us to understand Valéry's critique, remarkably

similar to that of Nietzsche (and Heidegger's interpretation of it) of Wagner, in which he also criticises

the Romantic Symbolist tradition to which he belonged (and for which, as Lacoue-Labarthe argues,

Wagner was in part responsible): 'Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire, - all great theoreticians, all

preoccupied with the domination of souls through the senses. They only dream of irresistible effects: it

is a question of inebriating or crushing. They ask analysis to show them in man the keyboard on which
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uncanny representatives which mediate inspiration, and save man from a(n even more

uncanny) direct experience of the source of inspiration. 106 Like Kant, Nietzsche in

The Birth does not question the protective power of art. But he does introduce a keen sense of

the tragic suffering which accompanies inspiration and its absence in the Phaedrus. The

affinities between Valéry and Nietzsche's description of inspiration, I will now argue, are

connected to a rediscovery in both writers of the tragedy of inspiration which was lost in

Kant's rewriting of the Phaedrus.

The basis for this argument is a simple one: Valéry explicitly denies that poets are

inspired. 107 This denial, we will now attempt to show, interrupts the aesthetic at the same

to play with certitude, and they search in an abstract meditation for the recipes which will permit them

to agitate with certainty the nervous and psychic being - their subject. [¶] Nothing could be further from

Corot than the concern of these violent and tormented spirits, so anxious to reach, and as it were

possess (in the diabolical sense of the term) this weak and hidden point of the being which delivers and

commands him entirely, by the detour of the organic depths and of the entrails' ('Delacroix, Wagner,

Baudelaire, - tous grands théoriciens, tous préoccupés de domination des ames par voie sensorielle. Ils

ne revent que d'effets irrésistibles: il s'agit d'enivrer ou d'écraser. Ils demandent à l'analyse de leur

montrer dans l'homme le clavier sur quoi jouer avec certitude, et ils recherchent dans une méditation

abstraite les recettes qui leur permettront d'agir à coup sur l'etre nerveux et psychique - leur sujet [¶]

Rien de plus éloigné de Corot que le souci, de ces esprits violents et tourmentés, si anxieux d'atteindre,

et comme de posséder (au sens diabolique du terme) ce point faible et caché de l'etre qui le livre et le

commande tout entier par le détour de la profondeur organic et des entrailles') ('Autour de Corot' (1932)

1309. Œuvres complètes. II, 1305-1325; my trans.).

106Cf. Nietzsche's discussion of art as redemption in 'The Will to Power' # 852 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev.

Spring-Fall 1888), 449-450 and # 853 (est. c. Fall 1886), 45-453).

107Cf. Benjamin, 'Paul Valéry' 390, and, in addition to the passage cited below, 'Poetry and Abstract

Thought' 76 and 79 and 'Remarks on Poetry' 214 (where Valéry denies the power of inspiration while

using it as the implicit cornerstone of his aesthetics). He elsewhere contrasts poetry with more
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time as it contests the subordination of poetry to music. Just as in Valéry, music for Nietzsche

is something toward which tragedy can strive, but never reach. Perhaps this failure, for all

Valéry's lamenting, will be what interrupts the aesthetic. Valéry writes of the view that 'It is

enough to be inspired, and things happen of themselves':

If anyone is satisfied with it, he must admit either that poetic production is a result of

pure chance or that it proceeds from a kind of supernatural communication; both

hypotheses reduce the poet to a wretchedly passive role. They make of him a kind of

urn in which millions of marbles are shaken, or a talking table possessed by a

technologically advanced forms of entertainment: 'One gives it [the mind] a ready-made powerful

poetry, indeed too powerful, that triumphs over our poetry of the days, which did not possess

landscapes, things itself, life itself! But this great force, this possession of the tangible world, is not

without some cost to us … I sometimes have the impression we lose by it' ('Necessity of Poetry' 226;

my emphasis). The technology of the new "poetry" makes possible an imitation of reality improved to

the point where one 'possesses' the real world. Thus it is mimesis that is linked to possession for Valéry,

not poetry. The effects of the new art forms also participate in the conventional economy subordinated

by Valéry to poetry's unlimited creation. 'Modern methods manufacture, on an industrial scale […] a

kind of poetry that requires no effort, no creating of value on the part of him who receives it; no direct

participation, but a minimum of himself; and this form of poetry is reduced to a more or less powerful

sensation […]. Each one of us might be a Mephistopheles' ('Necessity of Poetry' 224). The lack of

'direct participation' implied by possession leads to a failure to create value and fulfil poetry's overriding

aim; it is a pleasure cheaply bought (like belief in the story). The reference to Mephistopheles can be

seen as more than a mere rhetorical flourish if we consider that this technology makes man participate

in imitation and limited creation, the very opposite of the free and unlimited powers of creation the poet

derives from the gods (cf. also Valéry, 'The Outlook for Intelligence' (1935) 157. CWV X (1962).

Trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews. 130-159 and Walter Benjamin. 'The Work of Art in the

Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936). Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New

York: Schocken, 1968. 217-251).

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"spirit." […] [T]he opposite of a god, the opposite of a Self ('Remarks on Poetry'

212). 108

In heaping scorn on the hypothesis of inspiration, Valéry does not abandon the concept of the

analogy between the artist and divinity. The poet is not inspired because that would make him

the opposite of a god; the less inspired he is, the more god-like. Inspiration is discredited in

order to give the poet's intelligence a role in the production of poetry: 'however sensuous and

passionate poetry may be, however inseparable from certain ravishments […] one can easily

show that it is still linked to the precise faculties of the intelligence.'109 Although the poet

108Compare, 'this Imagist account of the mind (which often sounds to be making it angelic) makes it

totally sub-human, sub-canine in fact, the mind of a blackbeetle' (William Empson. 'Rhythm and

Imagery in English Poetry' (1961; 1962) 161. Argufying. Ed. John Haffenden. London: Hogarth, 1988.

147-164). Empson's remark is not directed at Valéry.

109'Preamble' (1928] 4. CWV VII, 3-7. William Kluback has written an impressionistic meditation on

the role of intelligence in Valéry's work, which he styles as a series of conversations with the poet, in

relation to Valéry's own reading of figures he (Valéry) admired (such as Leonardo, Poe and Mallarmé),

as well as suggestive topoi in Valéry's work (such as dance): Paul Valéry: the search for intelligence.

New York: Peter Lang, 1993. The concept of intelligence which Kluback admires in Valéry is,

however, different from the one which Valéry opposes to inspiration. Kluback values in Valéry an

intelligence which is always original, and which avoids systematisation; a questioning which never rests

content with particular answers, while always realising the need for decisions (cf. 134-136). Such

intelligence is, in fact, a form of Kantian disinterestedness. For Valéry, that disinterestedness

characterises poetry in its imitation of music, and in its opposition to utilitarian language. The

intelligence which Valéry opposes to inspiration is a more down to earth intelligence, and forces the

poem to engage with everything which its imitation of music sought to avoid (Kluback's interpretation

of Valéry's concept of intelligence is similar to Folliot's translation of Valéry's use of métier below § 3

n). This leads Valéry's poetry to a crux which enables him to demarcate himself from the aesthetic. This

crux, I would suggest, is more productive than Kluback's (wholly aesthetic) concept of intelligence,
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receives his first line from the gods, he must use his intelligence to write the rest himself.

Valéry's attempt to give intelligence a role in aesthetic creation is anticipated by Kant, who as

we saw earlier assumes a kind of mutually beneficial co-operation between inspiration and

the poet's intelligence (Taste). Valéry radicalises Kant's position by positing an intelligence

that can work without the gift of inspiration.

But we saw earlier that Valéry radicalises Kant's aesthetics in the opposite direction,

by yearning for a world of music divorced from the duties of meaning and accuracy, from

precisely those duties whereby Taste controls genius. So on the one hand, intelligence (under

which accuracy of description etc. is contained) is resented as a kind of straitjacket on the

freedom of genius as described in Kant, but on the other hand, what makes possible the

freedom toward which poetry strives malgré this straitjacket, is dismissed by Valéry in order

to give an increased role to the very intelligence which limits it in Kant. We move with

Valéry from Kant's notion of a division of labor between the transcendent and the human,

genius and taste, inspiration and intelligence, divinity and humanity, to a notion of a divine

human intelligence, a human intelligence that transcends practical limited intelligence, a

human intelligence that transcends itself. 110 We are left with a concept of aesthetic

which, in resolving to be unresolved (to avoid 'conclusive conclusions' at 134), places itself in its own

aporia. But that aporia is not a productive one, because the very resolution to be unresolved, for all its

aporia, exempts anyone - by definition - from confrontation with irresolution.

110Cf. Walter Benjamin. 'Paul Valéry' (1931) 388. Compare Nietzsche's remark that by clinging to the

things of this world man 'holds firmly to the great conception of man, that man becomes the transfigurer

of existence when he learns to transfigure himself' ('The Will to Power as Art' # 820, 434). Valéry

betrays an ambivalence about the relationship between the human and the divine when specifically

discussing intelligence (in 'Remarks on Intelligence' (1925]. CWV X, 72-88 and 'Outlook for

Intelligence'). He repeatedly argues that no final conclusion can be reached as to the definition of

intelligence (cf. Œuvres I 1049 [section not translated in 'Remarks on Intelligence'] and 'Outlook for
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intelligence which is really a complication of Kant's aesthetic ideas. Rational ideas, Kant

argues, are transcendent, superhuman, and cannot be experienced. But aesthetic ideas can,

while still keeping that link with the supersensible. So aesthetic ideas lead, in the last

instance, to a human experience of what transcends human experience. Thus the intelligence

required of Valéry's poet is an intelligence capable of aesthetic ideas.

'But inspiration belongs to and is meant for the reader, just as it is the poet's task

[comme il appartient au poète] […] to make sure one attributes only to the gods a work that is

too perfect or too moving to be the product of human hands.' Here we witness a crux in

Valéry's argument. On the one hand, his whole poetics imply that poetry is a production

superior to all human productions, and all his descriptions of the sources of the poet's ability

to write poetry are underwritten by the logic of inspiration. But in a parallel gesture he denies

that the poet is inspired: 'the poet's craft [métier; trans. altered] 111 does not so much consist in

Intelligence' 138 and 157). He writes on the one hand that 'it is in the nature of intelligence to do away

with [d'en finir - also end or de-limit] the infinite and to abolish [exterminer] repetition' ('Man and the

Sea Shell' (1937] 9. CWV XIII (1964). Trans. Ralph Mannheim. 3-30), and describes intelligence

('Outlook for Intelligence' 137-139) as complicitous with the anti-artistic technological development he

criticises in 'Necessity of Poetry' (above). But he also describes another kind of intelligence whose

motor force is sensibility ('Outlook for Intelligence' 139), and imagines 'a beneficent emptiness

[vacance - also vacation] that brings the mind back to its true [propre] freedom. Here it is only

concerned with itself. Freed from its obligations toward practical knowledge' ('Outlook for Intelligence'

142). This is the artistic intelligence. The impossibility of reducing one intelligence to the other leads

Valéry to argue that 'we find in the intellectual population these two remarkable categories: intellectuals

who serve some purpose and intellectuals who serve none' ('Remarks on Intelligence' 84).

111The currency of métier in French encompasses both the English 'job' or 'trade', and the more

idealised notion of a vocation. Valéry's definition of poetry as something both superior to any 'job', but

nevertheless a part of human activity, a kind of job, makes the use of this word here highly

problematical. By translating métier as 'task', Folliot assists Valéry in the task of idealising the activity
 325

receiving gifts [presents] from an unknown god as in striving to bestow them himself -

making them as divine as he can' ('Remarks on Poetry' 215). 112 In the Platonic aesthetic, the

of the poet, a task whose validity Valéry questions: 'These […] considerations will help to differentiate

or define […] the aesthetic order. But the order of finite aims [tendences], the practical order […]

combines with it in many ways. […] [W]hat we call a "work of art" is the result of an action whose

finite aim is to call forth […] infinite developments […]. From this we may infer [déduire] that the artist

is a "double man [être; lit. being]"' (Valéry, 'The "Aesthetic Infinite".' (1934] 82. CWV XIII, 80-82).

'Metier' is actually also an English word, used to mean something for which you have a particular talent

or calling, a vocation. I choose to translate 'métier' with 'craft' however because 'métier' itself translates

what is designated by technè, both in its Heideggerian and Platonic sense, as the calling of Being into

unconcealedness, and as craftsmanship. The performance of 'craft' in English covers both the prosaic

and idealised (poetic) attributes attached to poetry by Valéry.

112 Nietzsche also criticises the idea of the inspired poet, while arguing that Dionysian rapture, a virtual

synonym for inspiration, is the source of tragedy (cf. Beyond Good and Evil Part I, § 5, 12; 'Von den

Dichtern' 274/275 and 276/277; The Will to Power Pt. II, iii (1), # 414 (January-Fall 1888), 223). I

would argue that what Nietzsche criticises is a similar kind of inspiration to that rejected by Valéry: 'But

one objects to us that it is precisely the impoverishment of the machine that makes possible extravagant

powers of understanding of every kind of suggestion: witness our hysterical females' (# 812 (March-

June 1888), 430). The state described by Nietzsche is one in which the mind is impoverished, and

opened to suggestion from the outside, just like the Platonic concept of inspiration in Ion and Laws IV.

This 'hysteria' amounts to a kind of possession. And it is a receptive form of inspiration, to which

Nietzsche, like Valéry (and in words which show a marked similarity to Valéry's description of Alain),

opposes a concept of the artist as giving rather than receiving: 'the extreme exhaustion of all morbid

natures after their nervous eccentricities has nothing in common with the states of the artist, who does

not have to atone for his good periods - He is rich enough for them: he is able to squander without

becoming poor' (my emphasis). Bouveresse remarks that there is a contradiction between the

importance for Valéry of the conscious agency of the poet at work, and his assertion that what produces

the poem is a nameless mystery (cf. 'Man and the Sea Shell' 13). He writes: 'Valéry remarks that the

mind is […] in a certain way chance itself. But at the same time, the mind at work has to be declared the
 326

Muse simply inspires the passive man. In the Kantian aesthetic, nature gives man a God-like

freedom, which man, without understanding it, uses in order not to imitate nature. Valéry's

poet though, is above such a gift, able to bestow his supernatural bounty without receiving

gifts from the gods. 113 But this leaves Valéry unable to account for the poet's supernatural

powers, asserting their unlimited otherworldly bounty while simultaneously locating them in

the limited human world.

Valéry's most pointed statement of this contradiction comes in his discussion of

Lafontaine's Adonis:

So the sentiment of love, which is weakened by possession, is developed by loss and

deprivation. Possession means ceasing to think; but loss means possessing

indefinitely in the mind.

Adonis, being unhappy, was about to become intelligent. The terrible

memories left behind by a season of excessive warmth and voluptuousness were

working on him, deepening him, leading him to the threshold of the most important

doubts, and they were threatening to involve him in those inner difficulties which, by

relentless enemy of chance' (376). But the contradiction reaches further than Bouveresse's banal

statement of it ('Chance is therefore the indispensable material with which the mind makes up

nonchance') (376).

113Derrida perhaps implies that in rejecting inspiration Valéry denies that the poet communicates with

the transcendent other when he writes: 'In the "normal" regime, the I controls the distinction between an

internal alterity, in some way, and an external alterity. Above all, it does not transform "deviations" that

it may attribute to an "intimate and functional origin" into an absolutely external source' ('Qual Quelle'

355/298-299).
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dividing our feelings, force us to invent our intelligence ('Concerning Adonis' 25-

6). 114

Adonis, the man loved by a goddess, is a symbol of the poet, and Venus is his Muse. As

Valéry argues so many times 'possession means ceasing to think'. Adonis's longing for the

times he spent with Venus, that 'season of excessive warmth', describes the yearning of the

formalist aesthetic for the intercourse with the divine and for the excessive generosity which

transcends economics, which are both the cornerstone and the unravelling of its project. The

essence of poetry, for Valéry, is the tragic experience of the absence of the divine and of

music. In this light, we can return again to Valéry's pendulum image, and a disarming

discussion of memory which immediately follows the passage quoted at length by Genette

(369):

I shall introduce here a slight observation which I shall call 'philosophical,' by which

I mean that we could do without it.

Our poetic pendulum travels from our sensation toward some idea or

sentiment, and returns toward some memory of the sensation and toward the potential

act which could reproduce the sensation. Now, whatever is sensation is essentially

114Cf. 'Notes on Tragedy and a Tragedy' (1946) 231-234 and 237. CWV VII, 231-241. Compare also

Nietzsche's description of how images and words protect us from the infinity of music: 'what seemed to

us like a hollow sigh from the core of being now wants to tell us how "desolate and empty the sea." And

where breathless, we once thought we were being extinguished in a convulsive distention of all our

feelings, and little remained to tie us to our present existence, we now hear and see only the hero

wounded to death, yet not dying, with his despairing cry: "Longing! Longing! In death still longing! for

very longing not dying!" And where, formerly after such an excess and superabundance of consuming

agonies, the jubilation of the horn cut through our hearts almost like the ultimate agony , the rejoicing

Kurwenal now stands between us and this "jubilation in itself"' (Birth § 21, 127-128; my emphasis).
 328

present. There is no other definition of the present except sensation itself, which

includes, perhaps, the impulse to action that would modify that sensation. On the

other hand, whatever is properly thought, image, sentiment, is always, in some way, a

production of absent things. Memory is the substance of all thought ('Poetry and

Abstract Thought' 73). 115

In this distinction, voice is present, thought absent, form present, content absent. Valéry's

yearning for form is a yearning for presence, the presence of inspiration; Adonis's yearning

for the presence of Venus; a yearning for the achievement of the aesthetic. The irredeemable

absence of the world of forms or the heavens, which at bottom, as we saw earlier, is the

absence which is always implicated in mimesis, prevents this achievement. 116 It is poetry's

failure to achieve the status of music, its being held back by the real world (which attends the

need to find a role for intelligence in poetry; both intelligence and language's irreducible

referentiality are similar to but not quite the Apollinian), which interrupts aesthetics. The

expendable philosophical remark in fact returns to Plato's concept of memory in the

Phaedrus. But the passage in 'Concerning Adonis' is aware that these memories are 'terrible', a

word which in that context could translate (and be translated by) deinon. The memory of the

absent inspiration, caused by the absence inevitably brought about by the intervention of

115Cf. 'A Poet's Notebook' 175.

116Valéry in rejecting inspiration departs from the structuralist concept of form as absence and content

as presence. In this he is motivated by a recognition (shared with Derrida) that the absence which

sustains the structuralist concept of literature is made present in another way to the structuralist when he

conceptualises it. This procedure is again Hegelian (as suggested by Derrida in 'Force et signification'

19 n 1 and 38-39/303-304 n 23 and 22-23, and by his description of form as the 'Orient', toward which

structuralist criticism orients itself): form is the limit and outside of content which the structuralist can

then reappropriate into his poetics. In describing form as absent, the structuralist yearns for its presence.

Valéry' defines pure form as the accomplishment of that yearning, in order to refuse it.
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memory and mimesis, are experienced as tragic suffering. Valéry's poetics take the formalist

aesthetic to the breaking point of its 'inner difficulties', leaving it at the point where it is

forced to invent its intelligence.

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Chapter IV

TRADITION

Valéry - T. S. Eliot - Heidegger

1. Leçon de Valéry

'L'Europe est finie': Valéry's Europe is certainly finished, and I have to acknowledge

that it is, in large part, my Europe too. But of all the poets, in any language, of the

last thirty years, Valéry was the one with the best right to utter this remark: for it is

he who will remain for posterity the representative poet, the symbol of the poet, of

the first half of the twentieth century - not Yeats, not Rilke, not anyone else. 1

Not even T. S. Eliot? In this chapter, I am going to examine that very question, which is the

question of Eliot's relationship to Valéry as a representative of the first half of the twentieth

century, and implicitly to everything which that half-century "represented". The remarks

quoted above, made in a broadcast for the BBC's third programme to commemorate Valéry's

death, describe in condensed form the relationship of simultaneous difference and similarity

which Eliot attempts to establish between Valéry and himself. Valéry's Europe is 'in large

part' Eliot's Europe too, but Eliot does not say to what extent. This is (in part) because Eliot's

1T. S. Eliot. 'Leçon de Valéry.' The Listener 37 (9 January 1947). 72. Compare Eliot's reference to

Yeats as 'the greatest of modern poets' in 'Rudyard Kipling' (1941) 235. On Poetry and Poets. London:

Faber, 1957. 228-251.

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description of Valéry as representative poet of the first half of the twentieth century follows,

in certain respects, a pattern of mimetic rivalry.

Although Eliot might claim to be a junior in relation to Valéry (he was born in 1888,

Valéry in 1871), the main part of his poetical output was published in the first half of the

twentieth century ('Prufrock' was published in 1915, the last of the Four Quartets in 1942). 2

If Eliot represents any period, it is, simply in terms of chronology, the same period as

Valéry. 3 But, according to the pattern of mimetic rivalry, Eliot's deference to Valéry (and to

Yeats and Rilke), his allowance that they and not he are representative of the period in which

he published most of his poetry, allows him to take precedence over them in another way.

Their Europe is finished, but because he is not representative of that Europe, his Europe is

not; Eliot grants Valéry 'the best right' to pronounce the death of his (Valéry's) Europe. Eliot's

deference allows him to suggest that he is literally ahead of his time, and part of a new

Europe which has not yet even arrived to replace Valéry's; it enables him to place himself

beyond chronology, as writing in and for a Europe which is à-venir (in the future, yet to

come). 4 'In my beginning is my end.'5

2A few of Eliot's poems, such as 'A Dedication to my Wife', were published after the war in the

Collected Poems (1909-1962).

3Cf. 'in the second half of the nineteenth century the greatest contribution to European poetry was

certainly made in France. I refer to the tradition which starts with Baudelaire, and culminates with

Valéry. I venture to say that without this French tradition the work of three poets in other languages -

and three very different from each other - I refer to W. B. Yeats, to Rainer Maria Rilke, and, if I may, to

myself - would hardly be conceivable' ('The Unity of European Culture # 1' (1946) 112. Notes towards

the Definition of Culture [hereafter Notes]. London: Faber, 1948. App., 110-124).

4Compare 'I have been bewildered to find, from time to time, that I am regarded as one of the ancestors

of modern criticism, if too old to be a modern critic myself. […] I fail to see any critical movement

which can be said to derive from myself, though I hope that as an editor I gave the New Criticism, or
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This is not to suggest that there was anything invidious in Eliot's sincere admiration

for Valéry; I do not want to follow the usual routine of mimetic rivalry criticism, in which

mimetic rivalry is uncovered from behind a hypocritical disguise of admiration, thanks only

to the critic's extreme ingenuity. That is because, in the first place, there is no attempt by

Eliot to hide his claim. One could still argue that, whether hidden or not, Eliot's (implicit of

course) claim to be beyond the time in which he was writing was a form of arrogance, a

refusal to conform to the laws to which we are all subject, an exemption of himself from the

limits of an epoch in order to claim a kind of timeless value for his writing, a negation of the

importance of historical context in order to achieve a form of metaphysical transcendence.

There are two related reasons for which there is no arrogance in Eliot's claim, and

consequently no implied criticism in my attribution of such a claim to him. Both reasons are

related to a concept of tradition which we largely owe to Eliot, and which none has done

more to develop than the project of deconstruction.

The first reason is related to Eliot's proximity to Valéry. His coming Europe (as we

shall examine below) takes Valéry's as its point of departure, and attempts to accomplish that

which Valéry's failed to accomplish. There is no sense in which Eliot ('Eliot') might credit

himself with achieving a new Europe, or a new poetry or theory of poetry, because these are

all products of a shared endeavour between himself and the tradition within which he writes.

some of it, encouragement' ('The Frontiers of Criticism' (1956) 106. On Poetry and Poets. 103-118).

Eliot declines to accept the honor of being the ancestor of modern criticism, just as he refuses the honor

of being the representative poet of the age in which the modern criticism he describes flourished. This

enables him to demarcate himself from the limitations of modern criticism which, as we shall see below,

he analyses in 'Frontiers'. This deference is connected to the coy joke about his age. Eliot is older than

the modern critics, but, by refusing to be their ancestor, he can also claim to be more modern than them.

5East Coker. London: Faber, 1940. I, 1.

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Eliot's new Europe is not 'his', since it is also Valéry's Europe. The 'new Europe' is still "the

original Europe," in the sense both of Valéry's Europe (the original Europe before Eliot's new

one arrives), and of Europe since its origins. At the same time, Eliot's Europe is absolutely

original in another sense (the sense which is synonymous with 'new'), since it only exists in

the future. That is why Eliot does not define what this Europe will be, but merely exhorts

other poets to write in order that it might be realised. 6 The new Europe exists in Eliot's

6Eliot is critical of looking to the future in a vague or wistful way: The age which came before the age

which Eliot is trying to delimit (i.e. before the nineteenth century), 'really had a good deal more faith in

themselves than we have. They were certainly not bothered about "the future". It often seems to me that

all our concern about the future, and even the most optimistic visions of it which Mr. Shaw and Mr.

Wells used to enjoy, are tokens of profound pessimism. We hardly have time to get any fun out of what

is being written now, so concerned are we about the quality of what may be written fifty years hence'

('Experiment in Criticism' 207. T. S. Eliot et al. Tradition and Experiment in Present-Day Literature:

Addresses delivered at the City Literary Institute (1929). New York: Garden Press, 1973. 198-215

(hereafter 'Experiment'). Compare however: 'the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the

pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write , not merely with his

own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer

and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has simultaneous existence and composes a

simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and

of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional' ('Tradition and the

Individual Talent' (1919) 14. Selected Essays (1932). Third ed. London: Faber, 1951. 13-22/ The

Sacred Wood (1920). London: Methuen, 1960. 47-59). Cf. also the claim that each poet requires 'a

small vanguard of people, appreciative of poetry, who are independent and somewhat in advance and

ahead of their time or ready to assimilate novelty more quickly' ('Rudyard Kipling' 229). Cf. also 'The

Social Function of Poetry' (1943 rev. 1945) 21. On Poetry and Poets. 15-25 (hereafter 'Social

Function'), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). Second ed. London: Faber, 1982. Pref., 41 and Pt. I,

42 (hereafter Christian Society), and 'Education in a Christian Society' (1940) 140-141. Christian

Society. 140-147. It is possible to interpret 'timeless' as referring to some abstract permanent value
 334

remarks as a duty and a hope, as a "Promised Europe". As such, there can be no arrogance in

Eliot's claim, because he does not claim to have realised the new Europe. This is not merely

because he calls upon others to realise it (which might be interpreted as being merely another

form of false deference), but because the new Europe is impossible to achieve (Eliot writes

that 'not the next generation or the next after that will arrive'), although at the same time

necessary to achieve. Eliot cannot, by definition, adopt a proprietary attitude to the new

Europe which is purely à-venir. 7

which is unaffected by historical change (e.g. in tastes, society etc.), but 'Leçon' suggests that it refers to

a time which is literally 'timeless', a time which is always arriving.

7This expression deliberately echoes Derrida's 'L'autre cap' (1990). L'autre cap, suivi de la démocratie

ajournée. Paris: Minuit, 1991. 11-101, in which he argues that Europeans have a duty to assume the

heritage of Europe. This involves a commitment to an idea of democracy which is not reduced to the

application of a theoretical democratic programme to particular instances (as they take place in the

present) but which 'remains to be thought à venir' (76). This means that it is thought as always being in

the future ('avenir'), and as something which is always yet to come ('à venir'). This definition of Europe

can therefore never be exhausted in the present, but always retains a reserve of undecideability. Such a

formulation necessarily risks an interpretation which would program that undecideability ("always keep

an open mind", "never say never" etc.). Alternatively, it might be reduced to an irresponsible openness

which would accept everything uncritically (cf. in particular 'L'autre cap' 23-24), a risk which attends

the Heideggerian concept of Being after the Kehre. What Derrida aims at in his definition of Europe is

something paradoxical: we must assume responsibility for the coming Europe, but we can never reduce

it to the principles according to which we assume that responsibility. Rather than a responsibility in the

conventional sense of mastery, we assume responsibility as pathos, in which we submit to the other for

whom we take responsibility. In the case of Europe, we take responsibility for it by submitting to its

unprogrammed, and therefore absolutely original, advent. There are further points of resemblance

between that text and Eliot's. Derrida starts from an idea of Europe as finished, as so old that it has

exhausted its own possibilities (of saying anything new about itself) (14). And the discussion is written

in dialogue with, or 'in the margins of' Paul Valéry (61), who for Derrida - as for Eliot - formulates the
 335

To understand this we must examine Eliot's relationship to Valéry's poetics, to which

the statement from 'Leçon' we discussed above obliquely refers. Valéry's theory of poetry, as

we shall examine in more detail below, is described elsewhere as a dead end by Eliot. 8 In this

remark, however, Eliot speaks of the end of Valéry's Europe, without stating precisely what

that Europe was. In fact, Eliot offers three interpretations of and responses to Valéry's

statement, all of which suggest different relationships between Europe and its literature. The

first response which can be made to Valéry's claim is 'to hope that it is not true', and to fight

against anything which would make it true ('we must continue to act and to speak, continue to

protest against stupidity and evil and to applaud intelligence and excellence'). This response

assumes that 'Europe' refers to European civilisation in its broadest sense, and, after the war,

would have been an important denial of what would have constituted defeatism on Valéry's

part.

However, Eliot suggests that another reason for Europe being finished for Valéry,

which might not require such a spirited denial, is that he had ceased to be able to write

poetry. This interpretation assumes that by 'Europe', Valéry meant European literature. But

Eliot offers another, more sophisticated reason: 'between these two meanings there is an

indeterminate area of meaning where my sympathies are also with Valéry.' This meaning, as

we shall examine below, seems at first to continue to interpret 'Europe' as meaning 'European

literature': Europe is finished, Eliot suggests, because a certain current in literature, which

extends far beyond Valéry, has run its course, and only the preparation of a new literary

sensibility will save it. But Eliot writes that 'Europe' will be saved by this, not 'European

idea of the finitude of Europe, as well as the possibility of finding an alternative to that finitude (which,

as it is based on Valéry's idea of finitude, is of course not an 'alternative' in the usual sense).

8This claim is made in 'From Poe to Valéry' (1948), and is also suggested in Eliot's introduction to the

Collected Works of Paul Valéry VII (1958).

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literature', and it is difficult to see why he should have used 'Europe' as shorthand for

'European literature' in this case. The third reason advanced by Eliot avoids an unpalatable

defeatism, but also avoids over-softening Valéry's claim by making it purely literary. It argues

that Europe, in its broadest sense, risks being finished, but that it can be rescued by a change

and renewal of literary tradition. This might be taken as chiming with the claim that 'poetry

will save us', using literature as a cure for the wider disease in society. Such a claim, as we

shall examine in more detail below, is the opposite of Eliot's position. Eliot rather argues that

literature - as literature - always has a significance which extends beyond the literary. The

renewal of literary tradition will only save Europe if it corresponds to a wider renewal.

Another difference between this remark and 'From Poe to Valéry', is that in 'From

Poe to Valéry', the observation that Valéry's poetics are a dead end is presented by Eliot as

his verdict on those poetics, a verdict which Valéry was unable to pass himself. In 'Leçon',

however, it is Valéry who first said (to Eliot in 1945) that his Europe was finished; Eliot

acknowledges that Valéry is aware of the dead end reached by his Europe. This fact will

become important when we examine the extent to which Valéry also anticipated Eliot's

description of his criticism as a dead end. Eliot's recognition of Valéry's awareness also

changes his gesture toward Valéry from simple critique to reconciliation. In the essays on

Valéry's criticism, even though Eliot does not explicitly recognise Valéry's awareness, the

same spirit of reconciliation is in evidence, suggesting that Eliot's recognition of Valéry's

awareness in 'Leçon' is still in operation in the later essays, though on an different level. The

recognition of Valéry's awareness points to an important similarity between Eliot's statements

regarding Valéry's Europe, and those regarding Valéry's poetics: both are presented as being

close to Eliot's own. Valéry's Europe and Valéry's criticism are dead ends from which Eliot's

(and his (coming) epoch's) Europe and poetics must take their point of departure.
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Eliot ends his broadcast by speaking of the future of the poetry of Europe as

implicated in the future of Europe itself:

I hope, in any case, that something will remain operative, on the further generations

who will have different criteria, and who will adapt verse to different purposes - a

leçon de Valéry. It would be impertinent of me to adjure French poets, or to tell them

what they should do with a language which is not mine; but I can say this with equal

urgency even if I am thinking only of English poets. The proper end of the romantic

is to achieve the classic - that is to say, every language, to retain its vitality, must

perpetually depart and return upon itself; but without the departure there is no return

and the returning is as important as the arrival. We have to return to where we started

from, but the journey has altered the starting place: so that the place we left and the

place we return to are the same and also different. In Valéry a long curve of

romanticism rejoins the classic. Now the journey has to be taken by new travellers,

and not the next generation or the next after that will arrive. And each new journey is

in some way more difficult that [for 'than'] the last. But it is by this perpetual

departure and return that the great languages of Europe can be kept alive; and if they

can be kept alive, then Europe is not finished.

Valéry's Europe, this passage suggests, is finished, not because Valéry has run out of

inspiration, but because it is part of a 'long curve of romanticism' which has come to an end.

Valéry is merely the final representative of that curve. We recognise in this remark a

resemblance with our argument above (Ch. 3) that Valéry takes us to the breaking point of

the formalist aesthetic. The attitude which Eliot adopts toward the first half of the twentieth

century, and implicitly toward the nineteenth, 9 is not an unfamiliar one. It relates to Eliot's

9Cf. 'To those whose taste in poetry is formed entirely upon the English poetry of the nineteenth century

- to the majority - it is difficult to explain or excuse Dryden: the twentieth century is still the nineteenth,
 338

argument about the 'dissociation of sensibility', which was first advanced in three essays

published together in 1921. 10 The dissociation of sensibility, resulted, Eliot argues, in the

English literary tradition being split in two directions, one following from Milton, the other

from Dryden. The nineteenth century, and its continuation in the twentieth, follow, according

to Eliot, the development instigated by Milton.

Although Eliot in his later writing grew suspicious of the opposition between

Romantic and Classic, 11 his use of the terms in 'Leçon de Valéry' is quite conventional: by

Romantic he means "The Romantics", the movement instigated at the turn of the nineteenth

century in England by Wordsworth and Coleridge (and by writers like the Schlegels in

Germany), and which (seconda Eliot) developed from Milton and dominated the nineteenth

century. 12 'Leçon' exhibits a change of tone vis-à-vis the Romantics: in the earlier essays, as

commentators have repeatedly pointed out (and sometimes taken Eliot to task for), Eliot

although it may in time acquire its own character. The nineteenth century had, like every other, limited

tastes and particular fashions; and, like every other, it was unaware of its own limitations' ('John

Dryden' (1921) 305. Selected Essays. Pt. V, 305-316)).

10'The Metaphysical Poets', 'Andrew Marvell' and 'John Dryden.' First published in the Times Literary

Supplement between 31 March and 20 October 1921; first collected in Homage to John Dryden.

London: Hogarth, 1924; reprinted in Selected Essays. Pt. V, 281-291, 292-304 and 305-316.

11Cf. 'To Criticize the Critic' (To Criticize the Critic. Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber, 1965. 11-26),

where Eliot discusses the circumstances in which he advocated Classicism in For Lancelot Andrewes

(1929), and how 'the terms have no longer the importance for me that they once had' (15). He also

questions the validity of the two terms in 'Experiment' 211 and 214. He had already endorsed

Classicism together with Catholicism in 'The Function of Criticism' (1923) 26. Selected Essays. 23-34.

He uses the term less readily in the essays which follow those collected in Selected Essays, and defines

and discusses the term 'classic' with caution in 'What is a Classic?' (1945). On Poetry and Poets. 53-71.

12Cf. his tentative description of Dryden and Kipling as 'classical rather than romantic poets' ('Rudyard

Kipling' 244).
 339

criticises Milton, the Romantics and the nineteenth century for adopting personality and

individuality as their supreme values, and calls for a new system of values and a new

aesthetic which would replace theirs. In Eliot's 1947 discussion of Valéry however, Eliot

seeks to reintegrate the Romantic into the Classic, to make it 'rejoin' the Classic. It should be

clear however that the 1921 essays already contained the possibility of the reconciliatory

approach which Eliot adopted toward Valéry; we are not dealing in 1921 with an unequivocal

condemnation of Milton and the nineteenth century, but simply with an attempt to show its

limitations; that attempt made it possible for the essays on Valéry to answer the question of

what the role of the nineteenth century viewpoint would be in the new century.

The terms in which Eliot describes the possibility of such a reintegration are in fact a

mature exposition of the concept of tradition which is best know from 'Tradition and the

Individual Talent' (1919). Eliot in 'Leçon' at once confirms and turns on its head the notion of

the relationship between the (Romantic) Germans and the (Classical) Greeks which we saw

Lacoue-Labarthe outline in relation to Hölderlin (Ch. 2 § 1). If, as Eliot argues, there is no

return without departure, then the departure (the Romantic) is necessary for the return (to the

Classics); it is only thanks to the gesture of which Eliot makes Romanticism the

representative that it is possible for civilisation to have a meaningful relationship to its

tradition and to the Classics (Eliot, as is well known, discounts the possibility of simply

maintaining or repeating the Classics in unaltered form). 13 In this sense, the Classics mean

"the Classics", and all Romantic literature exists to depart from the Classics in order to return

to them. Eliot makes another remark which develops one of the key themes of 'Tradition': 'We

have to return to where we started from, but the journey has altered the starting place: so that

13'Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate

generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should be positively

discouraged' ('Tradition' 14).

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the place we left and the place we return to are the same and also different.' The new work of

art changes the old one to which it returns. In 'Tradition' however, Eliot merely writes that

What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens

simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments

form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the new (the really new)

work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives;

for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must

be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so relations, proportions, values of each work of

art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the

new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English

literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as

much as the present is directed by the past ('Tradition' 15).

One could say that the statement in 'Leçon' is more radical than that in 'Tradition', but I think

it would be more accurate to say that it makes explicit the radicality of the earlier statement.

Not only does the new work, as 'Tradition' states, alter the past by altering the relationships

between the works which constitute tradition ('relations, proportions, values of each work of

art toward the whole are readjusted'), but the Classical works themselves ('the journey has

altered the starting place'). Keats's two Hyperion poems do not just alter the position of the

Homeric hymn To Hermes and of Paradise Lost within tradition, but transforms them into

different poems.

Although Eliot does not say explicitly how this should be the case, Derrida's writing

on iterability in 'Signature Event Context' offers us a suggestion. The works of the present use

a language which they inherit from the works of the past. They are 'directed' in their own use

by the use which past literature has made of those words; every use is a citation of past uses,
 341

and derives its meaning from those past uses, at the same time as its present use extends that

meaning. By the same token, any reading in the present of the Classics can only understand

the words it employs with reference to their subsequent use. 14 Every new work of art

therefore alters the classic works in its tradition. 15 Not only the arrival of a new work of art,

but the very fact of continued linguistic use changes the Classics (and one might add, the new

work of art is directed by all past uses of language, not just the "Classics"). But works of art,

by virtue of the very fact that they are (considered) works of art, will change the way we read

the Classics to a greater extent than other uses of language. That of course raises the question

of what constitutes a work of art, and one of the definitions suggested by Eliot is that the

work of art is constituted by its reference to the classic works of art, by the fact that it

transforms the Classics. 16 As opposed to the incidental 'citation' of the Classic, by any use of

14Unless it deliberately forgets all uses of the words employed in the Classic work which are subsequent

to that work, the possibility of which I would question. I should add that this argument holds for non-

literary uses of language, in music and visual art for example.

15One should also not restrict 'its tradition' to works in the same language. A translation can transform

its original, and not merely in the sense in which no translation is the exact reproduction of the original

('tradutore, traditore'): if a word in one language has a similar use to a word in another, and therefore is

used to translate that word, any subsequent use of the translating word will extend the significance of

the translated one. This is not to say that translations are "of equal validity and importance" with the

originals, or that any translation, however inaccurate, will change the original. Our reading of a word

can only be changed by its translation, and the semantic adventure of the word with which it is

translated, to the extent that that translation is an accurate one.

16The Classics must of course in this case be understood flexibly, in a sense close to what Bakhtin

attempted to articulate in his definition of the epic, as all previous works of art which the new work can

use as a resource. Cf. 'Epic and Novel: Toward a methodology for the study of the novel' (1941) and

'From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse' (1940). The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson

and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin and London: U of Texas P, 1981. 3-40 and 41-83.
 342

the same words as those which it uses, the new work of art would achieve something new,

which had been already attempted by the Classic.

This general statement is of course problematic, as is the question of what the Classic

work seeks to achieve. Eliot would not draw a distinction in kind between artistic uses of

language and non-artistic, and would accept that any use of language might make a

contribution to tradition. 17 The work of art would have to be defined in general terms as a

work which understood the tradition within which it was writing to a superior degree (Eliot

might say 'more consciously'), or understood something in that tradition which that tradition

was attempting to say, and then said it. This returns us to the formulation of 'Leçon': the

Romantic departs from the Classic only to return to the Classic, it says what was said by the

Classic, as that which the Classic left unsaid. The work of art is defined, in a sense of

definition to be questioned, as the mimesis of tradition. This of course is not to define it, that

is to say define it aesthetically. Because what has been unsaid by tradition is always unsaid,

one can never define it; that which the work of art must do is always a secret (unsaid) until it

is done (said).

Eliot's discussion of Valéry's lesson, in highly condensed form, makes the assertion,

latent in 'Tradition', that new works of art change the works which constitute the tradition to

which those new works relate. Implicit within that notion of tradition is a definition of art

which avoids the aesthetic, at the perhaps inevitable cost of leaving the aporia of art as

defined as the event of something which cannot be programmed. And this concept of art,

Eliot argues, is crucial to the survival of Europe. What we will explore is the extent to which

what is at stake in the renewal of literature and of literary tradition for Eliot is similar to that

17Cf. for example 'I am not speaking of what a supreme poet […] does for later poets, […], but of what

he does for everybody after him who speaks that language […] whether they are poets, philosophers,

statesmen or railway porters' ('What Dante Means to Me' (1950) 133. To Criticize the Critic. 125-135).
 343

which is at stake for Heidegger in the delimitation of the aesthetic. Eliot turns the

Hölderlinian scheme upside down because, in order to make the Romantic return to the

Classic, the new generation of poets must rewrite the Romantics in the manner in which the

Romantics had to rewrite the Classics. 18 This extra twist presents us with an abyssal scenario,

in which the new Classics rewrite the Romantics in order to say what was unsaid by them,

which is what was unsaid by the Classics. In order to understand this scheme, we must

examine Eliot's concept of tradition in more detail.

2. Il n'y a Pas de Hors-Tradition

Eliot argues that anyone writing at any time can only write because they are related to

tradition. It is only by submitting to that tradition, and by writing within it that the writer is

able to say something new. 19 And the more traditional he is, the more original. 20 When we

18Although "the Classics" (Homer, Virgil etc.) provide Eliot with the matrix for his notion of "texts

which modern texts can use", he does not argue that only those texts deemed to be "Classics" can be

rewritten in this way.

19Cf. 'Unity of European Culture # 1' 114, and 'The Function of Criticism' 24.

20Cf. 'Introduction' 17. Joseph Pieper. Leisure, the Basis of Culture ([c. 1947]). Trans. Alexander Dru.

London: Faber, 1952. 11-17, 'What is a Classic?' (1944) 57-58, 63. On Poetry and Poets. 53-71 and

'Johnson as Critic and Poet' 181-182 and 192. On Poetry and Poets. 162-192. Compare: 'Geoff

[Bennington]'s reading of Kant is, I am almost sure, a valid countersignature for Kant. It adds

something new that is Geoff's gesture, Geoff's invention; but this invention is an interesting one only to

the extent that it acknowledges an event that was already there, which is Kant's text. If you ask me why

do you have to apply yourself to these things, it is because they are other and I cannot, and I should not,

and I do not want to erase this otherness. And they are other to the extent that they were before me,

which means that I am before them. I am before them as before the Law. They are the Law. So, in that

case, my duty, my obligation of being before them, is to countersign with my own blood, my own ink,

my own work, countersign what they have done and in a way that their ghosts could not only approve or
 344

try to be 'original', that is to say, when we attempt to say something which is outside of

tradition, we end up repeating the past through our ignorance of it. 21 Because it is impossible

to write outside of tradition, the only way to write something new is to say something which

has already been said by tradition. That is why Eliot argues that the most primitive elements

of any culture perdure in its most advanced works of art at an unconscious level. 22

Returning to Eliot, we find him arguing that the common notion of the classic as

something written in the past, and which we have therefore understood sufficiently to move

on to something new, is mistaken, because the most original and surprising writing is also the

most classical, and therefore the Classic, if we address ourselves rightly toward it, will also

be the most original. 23 To simply repeat what has been written before is not truly traditional,

recognise something, but also be enriched by a gift; and accepting a gift means countersigning'

(Derrida, 'As if I were Dead' 220-221. Applying: To Derrida. Eds. John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins and

Julian Wolfreys. London: Macmillan, 1996. 212-226).

21Cf. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber, 1934. Ch. 1, 23-24.

22Cf. 'Johnson' 167, Notes Ch. 1, 22, 30-31, Ch. 2, 37, 41, 48, Ch. 6, 94, 106-107, After Strange Gods

Ch. 1, 18, 29, 'The Growth of Civilization and The Origin of Magic and Religion (Review)'. Criterion 2

(July 1924). 489-491, 'Tradition' 16, 'War Paint and Feathers' [Review of W. Cronyn ed., The Path of

the Rainbow]. The Athenaeum 4668 (October 17 1919). 1036, 'Tarr' (Review). Egoist 5 (September

1918). 1036, and Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1916). Ed. Anne C.

Bolgan. London: Faber, 1964. Ch. 1, 16, 20, 28, 30. Ch. 4, 85, Ch. 6, 152, Ch. 7, 167. Cf. also

Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Ch. 9, 194-197.

23'It should hardly be necessary to add that the "classical" is just as unpredictable as the romantic, and

that most of us would not recognise a classical writer if he appeared, so queer and horrifying he would

seem even to those who clamour for him' (After Strange Gods Ch. 1, 29). Cf. also Pieper, Leisure, the

Basis of Culture Intro., 14-16; Christian Society Pref., 41; and 'Experiment' 200 and 211. That is why

Eliot opposes a concept of past literature as past, in which it has no relevance to the present, and
 345

moreover, and Eliot is opposed to any sentimental or reverential attitude to the past. 24 To be

traditional the writer must be original. 25 Every age must therefore rewrite tradition in its own

way, and can only maintain a meaningful relationship with the past if it continues to produce

original work. 26 It does so with the advantage of being able to benefit from the achievements

of its predecessors, but also the disadvantage that certain opportunities have already been

taken by previous writers, and are no longer available. 27

therefore is only of 'historical' interest; such an attitude would level all achievements of the past, cf. Use

of Poetry Intro., 18 and 'Experiment in Criticism' 206.

24Cf. After Strange Gods Ch. 1, 18.

25Cf. 'if an English poet is to learn how to use words in our time, he must devote close study to those

who have used them best in their time, to those who, in their own day, have made the language new'

('Social Function of Poetry' 22), and '[t]o conform merely would be for the new work not to really

conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art' ('Tradition' 15). Cf. also

'Introduction' xi. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. Second ed. London: Faber, 1960. ix-

xv.

26Cf. 'If we cease to believe in our future, the past would cease to be fully our past: it would become the

past of a dead civilization. And this consideration must operate with particular cogency on the mind of

those who are engaged in the attempt to add something to the store of English literature' ('What is a

Classic?' 65). Cf. also, '[i]t is […] through the living authors that the dead remain alive' ('Social

Function' 22; cf. also 21), and 'Introduction' [9-10]. S. L. Bethell. Shakespeare and the Popular

Dramatic Tradition (1944). London and New York: Staples, 1948. [9-11] (there are no page numbers

before page 13 in this edition).

27Cf. 'But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness

of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show. [¶] Someone said:

"The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and

they are that which we know' ('Tradition' 16). Cf. also 'Johnson' 165-168.
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In 'To Criticize', Eliot says that much debated terms like 'objective correlative' 'arise

from my feeling of kinship with one poet or with one kind of poetry rather than another' (20).

On one level, this is a confirmation of the relationship with tradition which we have outlined

above, that criticism of the past always accomplishes the project which was latent in that

past, and that criticism is only effective when it is written about authors with whom the critic

enjoys the kinship described by Eliot. But two issues complicate this scenario. Eliot is talking

about writers who have influenced his own creative output: 'I am certain of one thing: that I

have written best about writers who have influenced my own poetry' (20). 28

Now, the concept of literary influence discussed above shows that poetry shares a

certain mode of relating to other texts with criticism; poetry and criticism are of course not

identical, but poetry, when it rewrites tradition, assumes a critical attitude toward it, in which

the modern writer accomplishes something which was only latent in tradition. Criticism has a

comparable relationship to past criticism, philosophy to past philosophy. But why then

should Eliot's criticism relate to those poets who influenced his poetry? What this statement

reveals, in the first instance, is that criticism must recognise that the relationship to tradition

which we discussed above is at work in poetry; literary criticism must criticise the poem in

terms of its relationship to tradition.

But since all works of literature participate in this process, what is the sense for Eliot

of concentrating on those which influenced his poetry? This point is related to Eliot's

frequently-made argument that his criticism, and the criticism he most admires, is made by

poets as a by-product of their creative writing, and used to defend the poetry which they find

most congenial as poets. 29 It reveals, I will argue, a strand of thought in Eliot which rebels

28Cf. a similar statement in 'Frontiers of Criticism' 106.

29Cf. 'To Criticize' 13 and 16, 'Foreword' vii. John Middleton Murry. Katherine Mansfield and Other

Literary Studies. London: Constable, 1959. viii-xii, 'From Poe to Valéry' 33, 'Milton II' 147. On Poetry
 347

against the aesthetic by undermining a certain aesthetic distinction between criticism and

poetry. That is not to say that Eliot lumps the two together, on the contrary, he is careful to

distinguish them. 30 Rather, Eliot's gesture concerns the attitude which criticism adopts to

literature when it criticises it. The modern poem, we will remember, is absolutely new,

because it is an absolute repetition of tradition. But to name this pattern is in a sense to

negate the poem's very essence, because its absolute novelty would become programmed by

the criticism (this is the paradox of the aesthetic which has been with us throughout this

thesis).

We must, in order to address this problem, further argue that in order to write

originally/traditionally, the modern poet must see the traditional work as absolutely original.

He cannot (and this stems from the point which we made in relation to Eliot's remark about

the unpredictability of the classic) programme the classic in order to offset his originality

against it. The concept of shared endeavour between the modern poet and the classic implicit

in Eliot's account means that the modern poet's original creation is also the Classic's original

creation. For the modern poet to create at all he must be absolutely surprised by the classic,

and Poets. 146-161, and 'Clark Lectures' (1926) # 1, 44. The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. Ed.

Donald Schuchard. London: Faber, 1993. 43-228. Eliot writes that the same is true for Dr. Johnson

('Johnson' 178, 180) and Ezra Pound (Literary Essays of Ezra Pound Intro., xii-xiii).

30Cf. 'Function of Criticism' 30-31, and Eliot's remark that Arthur Symons was stimulated by the poetry

he admired to write criticism which was a substitute for poetry, whereas Swinburne's criticism gained by

his having satisfied his creative impulse in his own poetry ('The Perfect Critic' (1920) 6-7. The Sacred

Wood. 1-16). Cf. also 'To Criticize' 11-12. Stanley Edgar Hyman crudely misunderstands this point,

thinking that it implies that criticism 'is in fact another kind of poetry' ('T. S. Eliot and Tradition in

Criticism' 140. The Criticism and General Essays. T. S. Eliot: Critical Assessments. Ed. Graham

Clarke. 4 vols. London: Christopher Helm, 1990. IV, 116-143/ reprinted from The Armed Vision. New

York: 1948. 73-91, 97-105).

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because of that Classic's absolute originality. 31 Therefore, for criticism not to lapse into the

aesthetic, it must also undergo the surprise of the poem it is criticising. It too must be inspired

by the poem (and hence by the tradition which writes it). 32 This is how I propose to read

Eliot's statement that he writes better criticism about those writers who have influenced his

poetry:

I think that if I wrote well about the metaphysical poets, it was because they were

poets who had inspired me. And if I can be said to have had any influence whatever

in promoting a wider interest in them, it was simply because no previous poet who

had praised these poets had been so deeply influenced by them as I had been. As the

taste for my own poetry spread, so did the taste to whom I owed the greatest debt and

about whom I had written. Their poetry, and mine, were congenial to that age. I

sometimes wonder whether that age is not coming to an end ('To Criticize' 22).

Eliot might be said here to use 'inspiration' in a conventional sense. 33 But the inspiration he

refers to is the influence of tradition on the modern poet; to the original/traditional in which

the poet sacrifices himself and extinguishes his personality. Eliot describes the influence of

writers whom he first discovered as a sense of 'intense excitement and sense of enlargement

and liberation which comes from a discovery which is also a discovery of oneself' (22). 34

'Discovery', as we shall see below, is the word which Eliot uses to paraphrase Dryden's

31Cf. 'the one thing [Virgil] couldn't aim at, or know that he was doing, was to compose a classic: for it

is only by hindsight and in historical perspective, that a classic can be known as such' ('What is a

Classic?' 54).

32Cf. The Clark Lectures #1, 45.

33Cf. his reference to poetry 'of inferior inspiration' in his preface to Homage to John Dryden. London:

Hogarth, 1924.

34Eliot writes that Laforgue introduced him to himself in 'What Dante Means to Me' 126.
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'invention' (which he likens to the French 'trouvaille'), and which is discussed, in relation to

Dryden, as a form of inspiration. That discovery is one which constitutes both the poet and

the tradition; and the tradition constitutes the poet in his discovery of it.

Such an inspiration is also required of the critic. Instead of an aesthetic criticism,

which states, from a defined position, that which the poem does, but sees itself as separate

from what it describes, Eliot argues for a criticism which is affected by the poem's

inspiration. The aesthetic definition of the poem is based on the idea of a subject who enjoys.

Eliot's concept of poetry depends on a concept of inspiration and tradition which undermines

that subject. For criticism to merely describe the process whereby the modern poem repeats

tradition, it would have to be the work of an aesthetic subject. Eliot suggests rather that

criticism must not be performed by a subject. For this to take place, criticism must be

affected by the poem in its unpredictability in the same way as the poem itself was affected

by tradition in its unpredictability. This, in effect, argues for a notion of dichterisch (poetical)

criticism close to Heidegger's concept of the poetic thought which would delimit aesthetics.

Both writers oppose a metaphysical concept of the subject by which poetry would be

reductively defined, to a concept of thought as poetry, which lets the truth or the originality

of tradition reveal itself to a something which is not a subject. 35

Eliot's statement raises another problem, which is also raised by the claim that his

generalisations arise from his kinship with one poet or one period 'rather than another'. This

implies that the poet must select from tradition those works which are most congenial to him,

35Cf. '"Eating Well," or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.' Trans. Peter

Connor and Avital Ronell. Who Comes After the Subject. Eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-

Luc Nancy. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. 96-119. Heidegger opposes such a thought to

poetic philosophy, which is written with the accidental features of poetry (images etc.) (cf.

'Typographie' 187), just as Eliot opposes poetic criticism which is a substitute for poetry.
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in terms of his ability to use them in the present as a resource for his own writing. But on

what basis is the poet to make that choice? If everything which he creates is also the product

of tradition, in the name of what should he make distinctions between different periods or

different poets? If his age (like every age) is a product of tradition, how can one period be

more 'congenial' to that 'age'? Eliot is not saying that the past should be evaluated by the

present according to an ideology of the present as independent from the past. The present in

its presence is constituted by the past. The ideology of the present from which I am

distinguishing Eliot is one which responds to the fact that the subject in the present

(including its ideas and feelings) is constituted by a language which it inherits from the past

(and is therefore constituted as itself in the present by the past and the other), by creating the

fiction of an independent subject, which (re-)appropriates the alterity which constitutes it.

But for the past not to be repeated on one hand, or to dictate its beliefs to the present

on the other, the present must criticise the past. In criticising the past, the present is not

asserting a position of its own independent of the past, but understanding how the past writer

did not achieve something which was contained as a possibility in his own writing. Although

in criticising the past the modern writer is not escaping it but accomplishing it, he is

nevertheless producing a new critical evaluation of it. This is the argument which underlies

Eliot's condensed remark: 'To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the

poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he

form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon

one preferred period' ('Tradition' 16). For the relation to be based on private admirations

would be to judge the past from the position of a present which thought itself independent

from the past. To form oneself on a 'preferred period' would be only to begin to submit to

tradition, but not to the whole of tradition, and therefore still to judge it from to an

independent present. But to accept the past as a lump would be to accept it without the
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exercise of critical faculties, to simply repeat it. This means that the writer must judge the

past from a position which he inherits from the past. The past is judging itself through him. 36

36Maud Ellmann's misunderstanding of this point is revealing: 'If tradition does away with absolutes

[…] its own monopoly of literature remains unquestioned, imperturbable. Tradition has no outside. […]

In fact, the search for novelty strikes Eliot as a perilous pursuit, more likely to "discover the perverse"

than the "really new" (ASG [After Strange Gods] 21, 15). The presence of the past has become

authoritarian, though Eliot conceals its iron hand by sentimentalising its paternalism' (The Poetics of

Impersonality, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Brighton: Harvester, 1987. Ch. 1, 37). I would respond by

arguing that tradition has no outside because of the law of iterability. Every act of writing repeats an

iterable code which it shares with the other of tradition. The only way to seek the novel outside of

tradition is to create the (metaphysical) fiction of an autonomous subject. The refusal to seek the new in

tradition will result in a repetition of the past. Derrida repeatedly demonstrates in grammatologie,

which Ellmann cites, that philosophers who confidently claim to step outside of logocentrism end up by

repeating it. That is why Eliot is right to say that there is nothing outside tradition, and that to seek

novelty will not produce the 'really new'. By describing the presence of the past as 'authoritarian', as

wielding 'an iron hand', Ellmann argues that although Eliot describes tradition as open ended, it is open-

ended only so long as the present does not disobey the past (tradition's open-endedness is insincere).

But, Eliot (and deconstruction) argue, the present creates the new by submitting to the past. Ellmann

can only make her criticism of Eliot by assuming, on the contrary, that there is an independent will of

the present which might be oppressed (to keep to vocabulary in keeping with Ellmann's) by an

independent past; her allegation of authoritarianism depends on the assumption, which governs her

whole work, of an independent (and metaphysical) subject. This notion of a conflict between an

oppressive past and an independent and slightly tragic subject is shared by Ellmann with Harold Bloom

(cf. below § 3), and Poetics of Impersonality Ch. 2, 74-75), and my argument with both writers will

reveal that they share many assumptions. The same point is also completely misunderstood by Hyman,

who writes that 'the idea of "altering" past literature becomes a whole body of critical work aimed at

revising the history of literature to emphasize [Eliot's] "tradition"; and the concept of "directing" the

present by the past flowered in [Eliot's] religious, social, and political reaction' ('T. S. Eliot and

Tradition in Criticism' 122). There is no 'his' tradition, because the modern writer can only write by
 352

At the same time, the very fact that the past criticises itself through the modern writer

complicates the notion of his impersonality, in a manner which returns us to the concept of

active/passive inspiration discussed in connection with Plato. It would be very much simpler

to say that the modern writer is the passive organ of tradition. And even if we do not argue

that the modern poet merely repeats the classic, such a passive concept of tradition might still

be squared with Eliot's; the modern writer would be completely passive in his most original

creation, in which he merely allowed what was latent in the past to realise itself. This

sentence is deliberately phrased to bring out the echo in such a notion of the rightful attitude

of man toward Being in Heidegger. Man simply lets Being reveal itself in unconcealedness.

But this is not Eliot's position. He argues that because of the modern writer's 'present'

concerns, those things which interest him and are important to him now, he will find certain

past writers more useful as resources for his writing than others. Although this 'him' in this

'now' is a function of the past, and therefore, one might argue, does not reinstate the

metaphysical subject, it raises the issue of the involvement of influences outside of tradition

in the writer's relation to tradition: 37

We must distinguish between taste and fashion. Fashion, the love of change for its

own sake, the desire for something new, is very transient; taste is something that

rewriting the past. What he writes is both the past and his; his 'revision' of literary history is not made by

him as a subject independent of the past. And the direction of the present by the past is the condition of

originality, and cannot simply be aligned with reactionary politics. Cf. also 'On the Place and the

Function of the Clerisy' (1944) 162. Christian Society. 159-167.

37Cf. 'Towards a Christian Britain' (1941) 119-120. Christian Society. 117-123, 'Frontiers of Criticism'

104 and 'Clark Lecture # 1' 43. Compare also an early and undeveloped expression of this view:

'Wyndham forgets, in short, that it is not, in the end, periods and traditions but individual men who

write great prose' ('Imperfect Critics' 29; cf. also 32).

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springs from a deeper source. In a language in which great poetry has been written

for many generations, as it has in ours, each generation will vary in its preferences

among the classics of that language. Some writers of the past will respond to the taste

of the living generations more nearly than others; some periods of the past may have

closer affinity to our own age than others ('To Criticize' 21). 38

The modern critic's relationship to the past is guided by something irreducibly contemporary

in Eliot. And the guiding of the present takes the form of a decision (e.g. which poet or period

is more congenial?).

One should of course stress that this decision has nothing to do with what is called in

contemporary educational circles the 'relevance' of an author (to 'present day issues' etc.).

Eliot demonstrates repeatedly in his criticism how the most irrelevant and antipathetic writers

can provide us with the greatest resource. 39 There is no question of "writers we can relate to"

here: the congenial writer must also, like the Classic, be disturbing and unpredictable. But

nonetheless there is at work here a decision, in the light of contemporary circumstances,

38Cf. Use of Poetry Intro., 26-27, where Eliot remarks that 'the man whose taste does not bear the stamp

of his particular personality, so that there are differences in what he likes from what we like, as well as

resemblances, and differences in the way of liking the same thing, is apt to be a very uninteresting

person with whom to discuss poetry' (27). It is the difficulty of the nature of the kind of agency involved

in the preferences Eliot is discussing here which brings him to make this energetic claim: 'In making this

statement I refuse to be drawn into any discussion of the definitions of "personality" and "character"'

(27 n 1). This is the very question which this thesis must broach. Cf. also 'Frontiers of Criticism' 114

and 'Preface' viii and xi. Léon Vivante. English Poetry and its contribution to the knowledge of a

creative principle. London: Faber, 1950. vii-xi.

39This is exemplified by Eliot's insistence that the remote eighteenth century is more worthy of

imitation than the Romantics who are more in tune with contemporary sensibilities.
 354

which carries all the weight of what Heidegger calls Entscheidung. In the issue of present

concerns and their role in judging which writers in the past are more congenial, the issue of

the subject is posed again. Perhaps it is according to the concept of the decision being

deferred in the sense of à venir that we can think of an active decision without a metaphysical

subject (just as we can think of the gift).

For all the difficulty of this issue, it allows us to understand Eliot's (at first sight

contradictory) occasional praise of personality. 40 This is the starkest of these statements: 'All

significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they

become facts, or at best, part of public character; or at worst catchwords' (Knowledge and

Experience Ch. 7, 165). To understand this statement, we must realise that Eliot does not

deny the validity of facts, but only distinguishes them from 'truths', for which he attempts to

elaborate a different meaning. This is what Eliot emphasises when he writes: 'I am as good a

materialist as anybody; but though materialist, I would point out what a little way such truths

bring us' (164). He does not assert that truth is subjective, or deny the existence of a real

world shared by different points of view. He only argues that facts whose truth is accepted

without interpretation are of limited interest. And this is because of the need for every point

of view to interpret truth for itself: 'these lived truths are partial and fragmentary, for the

finest tact after all can give us only an interpretation, and every interpretation, along perhaps

with some utterly contradictory interpretation, has to be taken up and reinterpreted by every

thinking mind and every civilisation' (164). Even materialism itself 'is only an interpretation'

(164); even facts require a minimum of interpretation. Public truths, however, or '[t]he things

of which we are collectively certain' (165), are those truths which we accept with the least

40Cf. also Eliot's critique of Middleton Murry's for 'denying the existence of the individual'. This stems

from his adopting 'a notion of the "individual" which is not Christian' ('Revelation' (1937) 176 n 4.

Christian Society. 168-191). Eliot's Christian concept of the individual is of the individual as

constituted by tradition and community.

 355

interpretation. Eliot does not dismiss the validity of these truths, but merely says that they are

commonplace. 41 There is, moreover, no independent subject interpreting in this

interpretation,: 'we have the right to say that the world is my construction. Not to say it is

my construction, for in that way "I" am as much my construction as the world is; but to use

the word as best we can without implying an active agent' (166).

This reintroduces a problematic gesture toward the given (reality or tradition), in

which, although we do not say there is a metaphysical subject, there is a participation which

is irreducibly contemporary. And it is only this participation which constitutes interpretation,

without which truths cease to become truths. This implies, I would argue, that interpretation

in Eliot's thesis has the same status as the preference for one period or one author by the

modern poet in 'To Criticize', while public truths have the same status as an indiscriminate

acceptance or repetition of tradition. Such a repetition prevents us from being traditional,

from saying what tradition does not say. And we shall see below that this particular repetition

of the past characterises an aggravation of personality through possession, in which the

subject which is theorised as autonomous from tradition and community is unwittingly

possessed by a particular historical personality. The more subjective it is, the more

unoriginal. Public truths, which are not interpreted for ourselves, but accepted as 'collectively

certain', are threatened with a similar fate. Because we do not interpret them, they become

predictable ('catchwords').

That predictability in fact defines the metaphysical subject's relation to the other. The

act of (personal) interpretation involves the submission of personality before tradition and the

other. By becoming 'public', on the other hand, truths become the truths of the subject (and

41Cf. Derrida's description of the new censorship of public opinion, which homogenises public

discourse, as being at work when an 'interpretation, that is to say a selective evaluation, informs a "fact"'

('La démocratie ajournée' 117).

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therefore less than truths), which the subject can afford not to submit to in order to reinterpret

them. It is in this spirit that Eliot criticises a kind of internationalism, which he contrasts with

an ancient Greek political theory that 'has to do with a small area, with men rather than

masses, and with the human passions of individuals rather than with those vast impersonal

forces which in our society are a necessary convenience of thought' (Notes Ch. 5, 88). Eliot

does not assert a metaphysical subject against impersonality here, but rather argues that a

certain kind of impersonality (different from his, and complicit with personality) erases the

specificity of each individual, each locality, and each instant in its tendency to generalise.

The individualistic separation from tradition and locality makes all people the same. The

concept of personality which Eliot defends has the same function as the necessity for

interpretation in the thesis: it prevents a kind of generalising assumption which turns the

object of its attention into the object of a subject's attention, in which that object no longer

requires the kind of attention in which personality is surrendered before tradition and the

other.

3. The Aesthetic Subject

The concept of the subject, which Eliot saw as the opposite of his concept of tradition, was

exemplified for him by Milton. Milton privileged, according to Eliot, both the musical

element of poetry over the referential (in which he accomplished the formalist project

attempted and undermined by Valéry), and a kind of lawless individualism. 42 To Milton,

42'Milton I' (1936). On Poetry and Poets. 138-145 and 'Milton II' (1947). On Poetry and Poets. 146-

161. Eliot's view of Milton is similar to Nietzsche-Heidegger's view of Wagner, and we find a similar

view of Wagner expressed by Eliot in the Clark (1926) and Turnbull Lectures (1933), recently

published by Faber. Eliot argues that Wagner represents a nihilist Schopenhauerian outlook which

divorces feelings from the intellect, and transforms art into emotional outpouring which at the same

time illustrates an intellectual message (cf. 'The Turnbull Lectures # 3', 284 and 293. Varieties of

Metaphysical Poetry. 249-295).

 357

Eliot opposes Johnson and Dryden, who represent sobriety, discipline, lawfulness, and

accuracy. In particular, he contrasts Dryden's criticism with a certain theory of inspiration: 'I

think that [Dryden's] distinctions are safer than many that more recent critics have made; and

the part of inspiration (or free association from the unconscious) and the part of conscious

labour are justly kept in place.'43 Just over a year and a half separates this broadcast from

'The Age of Dryden' (2 December 1932), 44 and the positions adopted are similar. Eliot is

aiming in part at what he thinks are Coleridge's divisions (e.g. between Genius and learning).

45 He implies that they do not strike the right proportion between inspiration and labor, just

as they wrongly distinguish imagination from intelligence (Eliot also locates inspiration in

the unconscious in 'Dryden the Critic'. Eliot uses Dryden to put in its place a certain aesthetic

concept of inspiration, which communicates with the irrationalism to which Eliot opposes

Dryden. This form of inspiration is also one which characterises, for Eliot, the nineteenth

century from which he wanted to demarcate his own poetry. Eliot thus argues that Shelley's

43'Dryden the Critic, Defender of Sanity' 725. The Listener 5 (29 April 1931). 724-725. The two

preceding broadcasts in this series were 'Dryden the Dramatist.' The Listener 5 (22 April 1931). 681-

682 and 'The Poet who Gave the English Speech.' The Listener 5 (15 April 1931). 621-622. Cf. Eliot's

argument that Dryden and Kipling 'arrive at poetry through eloquence; for both, wisdom has primacy

over inspiration' ('Kipling' 244), his remark that Blake's poems 'show very sadly that genius and

inspiration are not enough for a poet. He must have education, by which I do not mean erudition but a

kind of mental and moral discipline' (Nation and Athenaeum 17 (September 1927). 779), 'Education in

a Christian Society' (1940) 143. Christian Society. 140-147, and 'Function of Criticism' 30.

44Use of Poetry. 45-57.

45I have suggested that Eliot’s criticism of Coleridge on this point has already been anticipated by

Coleridge in a forthcoming article: 'Platonic Memory/Romantic Imagination.' Q/W/E/R/T/Y [Université

de Pau] (forthcoming; included as App. IV).

 358

ideas are the ideas of adolescence, 46 and that the poetry of the Romantics is particularly

suited to adolescence: 47

At this period, the poem, or the poetry of a single poet, invades the youthful

consciousness and assumes complete possession for a time. We do not really see it as

something with an existence outside ourselves; much as in our youthful experiences

of love, we do not so much see the person as infer the existence of some outside

object which sets in motion these new and delightful feelings in which we are

absorbed. The frequent result is an outburst of scribbling which we may call

imitation, so long as we are aware of the meaning of the word 'imitation' which we

employ. It is not deliberate choice of a poet to mimic, but writing under a kind of

daemonic possession by one poet (Use of Poetry Intro., 25-26). 48

Although Eliot is tongue in cheek in his description of adolescent inspiration as

'daemonic possession', he would discuss such possession seriously a year later in the lecture

46'Shelley and Keats' 80. Use of Poetry. 78-94.

47Cf. Use of Poetry Intro., 25 and 'Byron' (1937) 193. On Poetry and Poets. 193-206.

48Compare 'Anyone who tries to write poetic drama, even to-day, should know that half of his energy

must be exhausted in the effort to escape from the constricting toils of Shakespeare: the moment his

attention is relaxed, or his mind fatigued, he will lapse into bad Shakesperian verse' ('Milton II' 150).

Eliot makes a similar remark in 'The Need for Poetic Drama.' The Listener 16 (25 November 1936).

994-995. For other descriptions of the dangerous influence which past authors, particularly strong

authors, can have on modern writers, cf. 'To Criticize the Critic' 18, Literary Essays of Ezra

Pound Intro., xi (where Eliot describes servile imitation of past authors as 'idolatry'), 'Milton II' 150,

'Johnson' 163, 'The Poet who Gave the English Speech' 621, and 'Dryden the Dramatist' 681. Cf. also

perhaps his description of Amiel as a receptacle for the ideas of other people in 'The Failure of Amiel'
 359

series which comprise After Strange Gods. There, he argues that possession is the result of

the excessive cult of personality. 49 Eliot's concept of personality is developed in most detail

in his thesis on F. H. Bradley, in which he argues that the concept of the subject is a

metaphysical construct, on which the subject of aesthetics is based:

In cases where the presence of the self is an important part of the meaning of the

knowledge, a sort of theory of knowledge is at work [my emphasis]. It is the sort of

knowing, I presume, that induces us to think of knowing as a relation. There is a

relation between the object and the self: a relation which is theoretical and not

merely actual, in the sense that the self as a term capable of relations with other terms

is a construction […]. As it is metaphysics which has produced the self 50 so it is

epistemology, we may say, which has produced knowledge. It is perhaps

epistemology (though I offer this only as a suggestion, and to make clearer the sort of

thing that I mean) that has given us the fine arts; for what was at first expression and

behaviour may have developed under the complications of self-consciousness, as we

become aware of ourselves as reacting aesthetically to the object (Knowledge and

Experience Ch. 7, 155). 51

(1935) 78. P. Mansell Jones. French Introspectives from Montaigne to André Gide. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1937. Ch. 7, 77-91.

49Cf. Ch. 2, 33 and 45, and Ch. 3, 53, 57-59 and 62.

50Eliot of course makes his critique of the metaphysical subject in the name of metaphysics, and

considers his alternative to the metaphysical subject as achieving the vocation of metaphysics (cf. Ch. 7,

157). We must be aware therefore that he uses metaphysics to describe a metaphysics of the subject

which he criticises, and the metaphysics in whose name he makes that criticism.

51Compare Heidegger: 'Falling back upon the state and condition of man, upon the way man stands

before himself and before things, implies that now the very way man freely takes a position toward

things, the way he finds them and feels them to be, in short, his "taste," becomes the court of judicature
 360

The subject who enjoys the work of art, who relates to the world as a subject, is the construct

of 'a sort of theory of knowledge'. This theory is based, Eliot argues, on a dualist opposition

between the subjective and the objective, the inner world of subjectivity and external reality.

To this, Eliot opposes a concept of the subject as a series of points of view, which are not

unified in a transcendent subject; unlike Hume's theatre of perceptions, there is no

transcendent spectator who watches the different points of view succeed each other. 52 The

implications of this for Eliot's theory of subjectivity is that the different points of view relate

to each other on the same basis as they would to external objects. What metaphysics

describes as internal to the subject is always already externalised, and always divided into

different points of view.

The demonic possession attacked in After Strange Gods is caused by a particular

concept of personality, implicitly based on the concept of personality critiqued in Eliot's

thesis. That subject conceives of its desires and beliefs as autonomous from, although in

over beings' (Nietzsche Ch. 13, 83). Eliot identifies the metaphysical subject with the aesthetical subject

elsewhere in the thesis. He criticises Alexander for arguing that 'the subject, as given in enjoyment' is

'the only form in which it enters into psychology' (Con. Psych. 243/ cited in Knowledge and

Experience Ch. 3, 68-69). He argues that the attempt to make 'conation so substantial as to isolate it

from the intended reality', i.e. analyse feelings in themselves and apart from the object, 'is to make the

tertiary qualities [i.e. the feelings apart from the object] aesthetic and entirely subjective' (70). Russell is

criticised as being 'very near to Kant', with his assumption that '[y]ou have the data of the sense united

by logic, and this determination of the manifold is for a subject, since the data of sense are real only in

acquaintance, and acquaintance means the enjoyment of a subject' (Ch. 4, 107). The division of the

world into subject and object, which Eliot argues is common to Russell and Kant, creates the

metaphysical and aesthetic subject who enjoys.

52Cf. Michael H. Levenson. A Genealogy of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Pt. III, Ch.

9.
 361

relation with, an outside world. The division of the internal from the external, described by

Eliot, is necessarily opposed to the concept of tradition in which even the most original

activity is a repetition of tradition. The concept of personality critiqued in After Strange

Gods is based on an isolation from tradition, and understands itself as self-engendered (as

described below in relation to Bloom). Two consequences ensue from this. The reader who is

isolated from tradition is at risk of being possessed by a strong writer. That possession is a

form of unoriginal repetition, which, as we argued above, can only be avoided by a

submission to tradition. The writer who perpetrates that possession, does so out of an extreme

assertion of his personality: he imposes his personality on the reader. This follows a pattern

already present in Plato (and Girard), in which subjective gratification, because transitory,

must be infinitely repeated. The quest for subjective gratification inevitably leads the subject

to compete with other subjects (or, on a larger scale, for cities to invade each other).

According to the concept of personality which Eliot contrasts with tradition, one person will

always relate to the other in function of his personal interests. This relation (which, as we

saw in our discussion of the gift, includes co-operation) will always in the end attempt to

benefit the subject. Conversely, only the divided subject of tradition is able to give to the

other. The possession critiqued by Eliot therefore not only privileges personality, but results

in an aggressive competition between personalities. Not only can we relate this analysis to

Plato, but to Valéry. Valéry criticises possession for the kind of passivity which is caused,

Eliot argues, by the unoriginal repetition of the other which results from an isolation from

tradition. 53

This is what takes place in the adolescent who is possessed by Romantic poetry.

Possession undoes the boundaries of the adolescent's self (he cannot distinguish outside from

inside), and at the same time makes him a subject and his beloved an object, substitutes his

relationship to the real word (he cannot see) for a relationship to an undefined beyond ('some

53Cf. Valéry. 'Necessity of Poetry' (1937; 1938) 224. CWV VII, 216-230; cited above at Ch. 3, § 3 n.
 362

outside object'). The kind of inspiration to which Eliot opposes Dryden is characterised by

the faults which he finds in Milton and in the nineteenth century. And it influences

adolescents with adolescent poetry, which is also romantic poetry. 54

The mention of influence and strong authors makes this an apposite place to discuss

the relationship of Eliot to Harold Bloom. It is often argued that Eliot and Bloom are kindred

spirits. 55 Certainly, each regards great literary ancestors as a potential threat to the poet's

54By contrast Johnson and the eighteenth century stand for the faculty by which the poet controls the

genius which was overemphasised by the Romantics ('Johnson' 190). Johnson's emphasis on judgement

varies specifically, in Eliot's account, from Dryden and Coleridge's analysis of poetic composition. Eliot

does not do sufficient justice to the importance of judgement in Coleridge's analysis of the creative

process (I refer again to 'Platonic Memory/Romantic Imagination.' App. IV), and endorses an over rigid

opposition between the Romantics and the eighteenth century which he is elsewhere the first to criticise.

Cf. in particular his remark that 'when it came to Donne - and Cowley - you will find that Wordsworth

and Coleridge were led by the nose by Samuel Johnson; they were just as eighteenth century as

anybody' ('Wordsworth and Coleridge' 63. Use of Poetry. 58-77). Cf. also 'Johnson' 189-190, After

Strange Gods Ch. 1, 25 and 27, Ch. 2, 34-35, Use of Poetry Intro., 19, 'Wordsworth and Coleridge' 74,

'The Poet who Gave the English Speech' 621, and 'Experiment' 211). These reservations are part of the

strand of thought which would lead Eliot to attempt to reintegrate the Romantics in the context of his

Auseinandersetzung with Valéry.

55'In most of the received versions, Eliot is presumed to be saying that poets learn by rewriting their

predecessors (as in Harold Bloom's theory of influence)' (John Harwood. From Eliot to Derrida: The

Poverty of Interpretation. London: Macmillan, 1995. Ch. 4, 118). Harwood does not attribute this

opinion to anyone, however (but it can be found in Ellmann, Poetics of Impersonality Ch. 1, 34).

Edward Lobb also suggests that Eliot's concept of literary history enjoys a similar mythical status to

Bloom's anxiety in T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition. London, Boston and Henley:

Routledge, 1981. Conc., 141-142. Lobb however rightly differentiates Bloom from Eliot because of
 363

creativity. And Bloom's account of the relationship of the poet to his ancestor at first sight

reveals similarities with Eliot's. By engaging with his ancestors, Bloom argues, the poet

liberates his own creativity. Bloom even cites Eliot's argument that 'the dead poets […]

constituted their successors' particular advances in knowledge', and comments that 'that

knowledge is still their successors' creation, made by the living for the needs of the living.'56

Bloom, particularly in the synopsis of Anxiety (14-16), seems to argue that the modern poets

relate to their ancestors as Hölderlin's Germans to his Greeks: in Clinamen (the trope which

provides Bloom with the title and subject matter for Chapter 1), 'the precursor poem went

accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that

the new poem moves' (14); in Tessara (Ch. 2): 'A poet antithetically "completes" his

precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms, but to mean them in another

sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough' (14). Eliot's remark that '[o]ne of

the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets

steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at

least something different' ('Philip Massinger' 206) - which he seems to have stolen from

Picasso, or Picasso from him - also suggests a kind of rivalry between imitating and imitator

poet which has affinities with Bloom's strong poet.

I would argue however that Eliot and Bloom are antithetical, and that the similarities

outlined above are an example of the similarity which always exists between metaphysics and

the attempt to think its contradictions. Bloom dismisses Eliot's remark in 'Philip Massinger',

which he misquotes as 'the good poet steals, while the bad poet betrays an influence, borrows

a voice', as a shibboleth which idealises the relationship between poets and their ancestors

(31). Bloom's misquotation (or should I say his deliberate misreading as a strong critic of a

Bloom's individualism, which Lobb correctly sees as opposed to Eliot's concept of impersonality (144-

146).

56The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Ch. 1, 19

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strong predecessor critic in order to speak in his own critical voice) is significant, because it

presents Eliot's idea of influence as a question of decorum: all poets are influenced, the best

are those who are able to get away with or disguise it. Bloom's disagreement with Eliot over

the nature of influence is also a disagreement over the nature of the subject. In Eliot, the

poet's originality derives from a 'continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to

something which is more valuable [tradition] […] continual self-sacrifice, a continual

extinction of personality' ('Tradition' 17). The poem is both his and tradition's. But Bloom's

poet rebels against tradition in order to assert his own identity as subject. 57

That is because tradition, in the shape of past ancestors, is seen by Bloom as a

hindrance to poetic creativity. Although Eliot also argues that certain past writers are stifling

as role models, this does not extend to all past authors, some of whom provide a beneficial

influence. Bloom recognises that the precedence of literary ancestors over the modern poet is

due to the fact that the modern poet must always write in a language which he inherits from

his ancestors (what Derrida calls the law of iterability) (cf. Ch. 1, 25). But he regards this

precedence as necessarily and unavoidably thwarting and frustrating the modern poet's

creativity ('the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more' (21;

cf. also 24-29). There is no escape from influence, and as literary history progresses, the

influence of the past becomes more oppressive: poetry 'when it dies, will be self-slain,

murdered by its own past strength' (Intro., 10) (compare Eliot's argument that there is no

improvement or decline in literature in 'Tradition' 16).

57Cf. Eliot's description of the challenge of writing poetry, which Bloom must have thought rather

whimpy: 'And what there is to conquer/ By strength and submission, has already been discovered/ Once

or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope/ To emulate - but there is no competition -/

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost,/ And found and lost again and again: and now

under conditions/ That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss./ For us, there is only

trying. The rest is not our business' (East Coker V, 11-18).

 365

But, Bloom writes, '[w]e know, as Blake did, that Poetic Influence is gain and loss',

and asks 'What is the nature of the gain?' This we can understand in connection with Bloom's

analysis of Milton's Satan as the archetype of the modern poet (20-21), and whose portrayal

by Eliot Bloom, significantly, criticises (23). Bloom compares Satan's situation in hell to the

modern poet's oppression by tradition. Satan is faced with two choices: 'to know damnation

and to explore the limits of the possible within it' or 'to repent, to accept a God altogether

other than the self, wholly external to the possible. This god is cultural history, the dead

poets, the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more' (21). By

choosing damnation and facing the oppression of influence (rather than submitting to its

inevitability), the poet may then assert himself by rebelling against it (just like Satan). The

weight of tradition can be turned to the modern poet's advantage because it allows him to

choose to revolt against it, and the greater the weight, the more heroic the rebellion. Satan is

in fact like Schelling's tragic hero, who asserts his free will by struggling against the

inevitable, and therefore choosing to be punished for that struggle. 58 Bloom's strong poet's

gesture of defiance is dialectical through and through: his loss (in rebellion) is his gain (in

becoming an individual by choosing to rebel) (cf. 34-35). 59 Although Bloom recognises his

58This is also true of both Œdipus and Prometheus, whom Bloom uses as figures for the strong poet at

10 and 35.

59We can also recognise another motif from Romantic concepts of art close to the oppositions outlined

in The Mirror and the Lamp: the ancient poets had a simple relationship to the reality they described,

which allowed them to represent reality accurately, while the moderns have lost that ability (that

innocence, that naïvety), and must resort to their imagination, which forces them to create a greater

work of art from their impoverished circumstances (cf. Baudelaire's comparison of Northern to

Southern art in 'Qu'est-ce que le Romantisme' 611, discussed above at Ch. 3 § 1, and Schiller's

opposition of the naïve to the sentimental). Derrida argues that the same relationship to the past

animates structuralism, when it defines itself as unable to create, and therefore limits itself to being
 366

critical rather than creative. But this admission of its own creative exhaustion enables structuralism to

look on the past as something finished and accomplished, and which is therefore unable to exceed or

surprise its analysis ('Force et Signification' 11-13/4-5). A similar opposition underlies a historicist

criticism with which Bloom might be less inclined to acknowledge his proximity. In his opposition of

the novel and the epic, Bakhtin argues that the epic's confidence in its point of view, and in its ability to

represent its world, is lost to the novel. But the novel thereby gains the ability to represent and relativise

the epic's discourse; its weakness enables it to master the epic. The novel's representation of reality is

open to question, Bakhtin argues, but not the epic's. Yet the novel's less confident grasp of the reality it

represents is more faithful to that reality, because it represents the plurality of discourses which

comprise an integral part of reality. This contrast can also be found in Auerbach's first chapter of

Mimesis, in which the Homeric epic enjoys a similar confidence to Bakhtin's. Auerbach argues that the

whole world described by the epic is represented there: there is no sense of a background reality which

might be absent from the poem. The epic also represents reality unambiguously: no aspect of its

description is open to doubt or to speculation. Auerbach opposes them to the Gospels, arguing that the

latter's narrative is full of significant gaps which give the reader the sense of a background reality which

is not made explicit by narration. But the Gospels' lesser command of the reality they represent, the fact

that this reality in part escapes their description, means that their representation is both richer than the

Homeric epic's, and more true to life (because doing justice to life's mysterious depths which the epic

smoothes over). The historical progression in mimesis charted by Auerbach consists (albeit not in a

linear way) of a loss of mastery over reality by the literature which represents it, which is compensated

by a more faithful representation of that reality's complexity. What underlies both the Romantic and

historicist opposition is a kind of mimetic rivalry, between epochs and between genres, which is similar

in its structure to the potlach (cf. Derrida, Given Time Chs. 1 and 2). The modern genre concedes

superiority to the epic (unquestionable point of view, anxiety of influence), but this gift enables it to

assert a different kind of superiority over the epic. For a discussion of this wide theme in relation to the

sixth century argument between antiqui and moderni, and its development in the Renaissance, which

culminated at the end of the seventeenth century in France as the 'querrelle des anciens et des

modernes', cf. Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis Pt. II, Ch. 7, 76-77. The belief of the modernes in the march
 367

indebtedness to Shelley's Defence of Poetry, his failure to acknowledge that his view belong

to a philosophical tradition of Romantic idealism (which has been severely questioned) is to

the detriment of his argument.

Where Eliot's poet accepts to submit to a beneficial tradition, in which his writing

can no longer be said to be his, Bloom's asserts his selfhood by rebelling against tradition.

Bloom argues that only the weak poet can, like Eliot, accept (and implicitly submit to)

beneficial influence, whereas the strong poet asserts himself by misinterpreting the ancestor

against whom he is rebelling (30). What appeared similar to a Hölderlinian relationship to the

past in Bloom's synopsis turns out to be the opposite: the modern poet misinterprets what the

ancestor said in order to be able to say something himself. Eliot, one might argue,

understands Milton perfectly, and his presentation of Milton as performing a perpetual

sequence of lawless acts is exactly what Bloom praises in Satan and in the modern poet. Eliot

adds that 'when [Milton] violates the English language he is imitating nobody, and he is

inimitable' ('Milton II' 160). Bloom might say that Milton is forced to imitate by the anxiety

of influence, but by an act of wilful misreading is able at the same time to make such an

imitation his act; his analysis is not incompatible with Eliot's. And Eliot also identifies the

same difficulty which Milton's rebellion creates for his predecessors as Bloom: Milton is

inimitable. Bloom and Eliot fundamentally agree as to what Milton represents, only not on its

value. The swerve at the final moment from the ancestor's text described by the act of

Clinamen does not carry on the project of the ancestor, but appropriates it for the modern

poet. Bloom argues that Satan as he fell would have been thinking: 'As I fell, I swerved,

consequently I lie here in a Hell improved by my own making' (45; Bloom's emphasis). 60 For

of progress led them to privilege the present over the past, a gesture which Gebauer and Wulf identify

with the origins of the concept of the individual subject (84-85).

60Clinamen is only one of six tropes described by Bloom, but each have the same effect of affirming the

modern poet as subject in the face of the anxiety of influence.

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Bloom, 'Discontinuity [from the past] is freedom [for the subject in the present]' (39). The

goal of the strong poet is the (speculative) goal of self-engendering (5, 37), and although

Bloom recognises that the anxiety of influence makes such a goal impossible on one level,

the poet's rebellion, he argues, achieves it on another. Bloom's concept of the tragico-

Promethean Romantic subject is therefore the opposite of Eliot's concept of impersonality.

Christopher Norris discusses Bloom in relation to Derrida in an uncharacteristically

lucid passage. The lucidity is not in relation to deconstruction, about whom Norris continues

to spout the usual clichés (Bloom 'is opposed to a deconstructive reading that would dissolve

psychoanalysis into an undifferentiated play of textual meaning'), 61 but to Bloom. Norris

accurately points out the difference between Bloom and Eliot: 'Bloom's is a dissident

tradition, which he traces back largely to the radical Protestant stirrings of the English Civil

War [which is] a line strategically ignored by Eliot' (117). That tradition, which Eliot does

indeed oppose - in the name of tradition and impersonality - as aesthetic, and part of the

metaphysics of the subject (although how he can at the same time oppose and 'ignore' it is not

explained by Norris), he also identifies with the Civil War (as we shall see below). And

Norris rightly points out that Bloom's difference with deconstruction also involves a defence

of the subject: 'The theoreticians of deconstruction in effect say, "In the beginning was the

trope", rather than "In the beginning was the troper".'62 Although uncomfortable with

agreeing with anything Christopher Norris says, 63 he rightly recognises an opposition

between Bloom on one hand, and Eliot and Derrida on the other, in which Derrida and Eliot

61Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London and New York: Methuen, 1982. 123.

62Harold Bloom. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithica and London: Cornell UP, 1977.

393/ quoted in Norris, Deconstruction 123.

63For an excellent summary of his book's weaknesses cf. Nick Royle. 'Nor is Deconstruction:

Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice.' Oxford Literary Review 5:1-2 (1982). 170-

177.
 369

are close to each other. That opposition derives from Bloom's belonging squarely to the

metaphysics of subjectivity, and to aesthetics, and the respective efforts of Derrida and Eliot

to delimit that metaphysics and aesthetics.

Eliot however does not condemn inspiration out of hand in his discussion of Dryden.

Not only does he (in 1931), argue for a balance between labor 64 and inspiration, but in 1932

he also interprets Dryden's remarks on invention as a kind of theory of inspiration. After

criticising the Dictionary for defining 'invention' wrongly, by presenting the intellect and the

imagination as making separate contributions to it, Eliot also censures its paraphrase of

'invention' with 'devising' ('The devising of a subject, idea, or method of treatment'):

The word 'devising' suggests the deliberate putting together of materials at hand;

whereas I believe that Dryden's 'invention' includes the sudden irruption of the germ

of a new poem, possibly merely as a state of feeling. His 'invention' is surely a

finding, a trouvaille ('The Age of Dryden' 49).

It is a nice question whether Eliot disagrees only with the 'at hand', or with the 'deliberately'

as well. Eliot's reference to the sudden irruption of the germ of the poem is an almost

conventional description of inspiration, but one which attempts to negotiate between

passivity and activity. The poem comes from without, and its materials are not at hand,

readily available, disposable, programmable. The irruption of the germ is a surprise, which

enlarges the poet's world. And the poet's action or finding is impossible to define as passive

and active. He has not come across the invention randomly, nor was he able to find it on his

own (it is not at hand). His action consists in being open to the inspiration, in letting himself

be guided by it once it takes place. In such a case, it is impossible to decide whether the poet

64One might ponder the relationship of 'labor', as Eliot uses it here, with Heidegger's technè.
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is deliberate or not. Eliot opposes an aesthetic inspiration of the subject, with an inspiration

constituted by an openness to the other.

I hope that our discussion up till now will have suggested that certain of the views we

have been examining in Eliot exhibit similarities with those of Heidegger. No investigation of

such parallels has ever been carried out, to my knowledge, even though Eliot (b. 1888) and

Heidegger (b. 1889) are as contemporary in chronological terms as is it is possible to be.

Eliot does refer (only once to my knowledge), to Heidegger. In the course of a critique of

Humanism (which, we must remember, is rooted for Eliot in individualism, subjectivism and

aestheticism), Eliot apologises for confining himself to Anglo-American Humanists, and not

considering 'men individually equally important in other countries' ('Revelation' 184). The

last group of such philosophers he mentions includes Heidegger: 'I should have a long

footnote about Logical Positivism, speculating how much it owes to G. E. Moore on the one

hand, and Brentano, Husserl, Meinong and Heidegger on the other.' Eliot in other words is

aware of Heidegger only in his logical positivist phase, probably through Gilbert Ryle's praise

of the English translation of Heidegger's Ph.D. thesis (1912).

I am going to discuss the similarities between Eliot and Heidegger of which Eliot

could not have been aware. Eliot makes a remark which implicitly goes to the heart of

Nietzsche's break with Wagner: Hardy's 'extreme emotionalism seems to me a symptom of

decadence; it is a cardinal point of faith in a romantic age, to believe that there is something

valuable in violent emotion for its own sake […] violent physical passions do not in

themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same

state' (After Strange Gods Ch. 3, 55). Nietzsche-Heidegger criticises the same thing in

Wagner: the unlimited emotionalism, the passivity ('reduce them'), and the Dionysian

undifferentiatedness. Eliot argues against this romantic ideal by saying that 'strong passion is

only interesting or significant in strong men; those who abandon themselves without
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resistance to excitements which deprive them of reason, become merely instruments of

feeling and lose their humanity'. Eliot, like Nietzsche (and Valéry), opposes a certain kind of

passive inspiration (which Nietzsche associates with the feminine) in the name of virility, the

resistance of the strong man. Both oppose a lawlessness which artificially stimulates emotion

with the law which uses its strength to restrain and give shape to naturally strong passions. 65

Eliot also writes: 'In consequence of his self-absorption, [Hardy] makes a great deal

of landscape; for landscape is a passive creature which lends itself to an author's mood' (55).

Romantic self-absorption goes hand in hand with a particular relationship to the environment,

in which it is exploited by the subject. This is also the relationship to nature which Heidegger

attributes to the metaphysics of subjectivity. 66 Eliot earlier in the same lecture series

discusses another attitude to nature, which is close to Heidegger's:

It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or favoured in climate that

seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between

man and his environment has brought out the best qualities in both; in which the

landscape has been moulded by numerous generations of one race, and in which the

landscape in turn has modified the race to its character (After Strange Gods Ch. 1,

17).

65Cf. also his argument that originality is most valuable only against the backdrop of common standard

('Johnson' 188), and that Massinger's morals were corrupt because of the 'disappearance of all the

personal and real emotions which this morality supported and into which it introduced a kind of order'

('Philip Massinger' (1920) 213. Selected Essays Pt. III, 205-220/ Elizabethan Essays 153-176/ The

Sacred Wood. 123-143).

66Cf. 'Typographie' 194-195, 195-96 n 33, 212 n 62.

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This is not directly the same definition of nature as Heidegger's physis, certainly. However

(and in what follows I am allowing myself to be guided by Lacoue-Labarthe's 'La

transcendance finie/t dans la politique'67), Heidegger's description of the advent of Dasein in

§ 74 of Sein und Zeit (1927) exhibits analogies with Eliot's remark on nature. Physis,

Heidegger argues, 'is the primordial Greek grounding word for Being itself' (Nietzsche Ch.

22, 181). The advent of Dasein takes place, in Sein und Zeit, when man stands before 'Being

itself' (or 'physis', after the Kehre) and questions it on its essence. Man, Heidegger argues in

Sein und Zeit, when he subjects himself to asking such a question, subjects himself to

finitude. But by virtue of that questioning he also transcends that same finitude, and may

'irrupt from the middle of the being in the being while going beyond it' ('La transcendence'

156). 68 It is this irruption which, for Heidegger, makes possible the being together in

community. 69

As in the discussion of Plato in the Nietzsche, 'the basic modes of behaviour that

sustain and define the community must be grounded in essential knowledge' (Nietzsche Ch.

21, 166). Essential knowledge, defined as the questioning of being (which Heidegger calls

physis in Nietzsche) by Dasein in its finitude, grounds community. That relationship between

Dasein and being, between physis and the questioning of physis (i.e. technè), is opposed by

Heidegger to the exploitative (in the basic sense) relationship to nature which attends the

metaphysics of subjectivity. 70 The former relationship is also described as a conflict

(polemos) between man and nature, in which man attempts to transcend the finitude imposed

67'Finite Transcendence in Politics/Transcendence [Always] Ends Up in Politics'.

68'faire irruption depuis le milieu de l'étant dans l'étant en l'outrepassant'.

69Cf. 'La transcendence' 151-156.

70Cf. 'The Question Concerning Technology' (1949). 'The Question Concerning Technology' and Other

Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland, 1977. 3-35.

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on him by his stance before nature. 71 Eliot too opposes the notion that the happiest lands are

those which yield the most to exploitation, to one in which the land whose conflict with the

men who live on it grounds a community is happiest. Eliot's concept of nature is of course

less developed than Heidegger's, and he does not draw many philosophical conclusions from

it. But the community-founding agon which he describes between man and environment

works according to a structure similar to that described by Heidegger. It is from this

perspective that we can understand the secondary similarity between Eliot and Heidegger's

agrarianism, which stems in both cases from the concept of nature which they privilege over

the exploitative relationship to nature characterised by industry. 72

Eliot's definition of culture in Notes contains a distinction which is similar to

Heidegger's distinction between technè in its genuine and adulterated senses. 'Culture', of

course, is one of the possible translations of technè, which like it is opposed to nature. Eliot

defines 'culture', provisionally, as 'all the characteristic activities and interests of a people'

(Notes Ch. 1, 31), and as 'that which makes life worth living. And it is what justifies other

peoples and other generations in saying, when they contemplate the remains and the influence

of an extinct civilisation, that it was worth while for that civilisation to have existed' (27).

Although this is far from Heidegger's concept of technè, we must remember that both use the

term to describe that which makes possible and constitutes the being of a people together.

And although Heidegger might sniff at the humanism of the notion of 'a life worth living', his

71Cf. 'La transcendance' 163-173.

72Cf. 'Virgil and the Christian World' (1951) 125-126. On Poetry and Poets. 121-131, Christian

Society Pt. I, 53, Pt. II, 60-61 and Pt. IV, 80, and commentary in Gareth Reeves. 'T. S. Eliot, Virgil and

Theodor Haecker: Empire and the Agrarian Ideal' 192-194. Agenda 23:3-4 (Autumn-Winter 1985-

1986). 180-201. Cf. also Valéry's ruralist comments in 'Variations on the "Eclogues"' (1953) 308-309.

CWV VII. 295-312, and compare Derrida's critique of the exploitative nature of a certain kind of market

economics in 'L'autre cap' 56-57.

 374

notion of technè as the supreme value of a community, and as man's historial destiny, is not

incompatible with Eliot's notion of culture. And it is the technè of the pre-Socratics which, to

Heidegger who contemplated their extinct civilisation, made their existence worthwhile. Eliot

also opposes to his notion of culture one which is defined purely around material gain, just as

Heidegger opposes genuine technè to technique. 73

Heidegger and Eliot also share a notion of community which is founded on poetry.

Eliot argues that for a community to exist there must be poetry written in its language: poetry

is that which makes a language distinct from other languages, which grounds particularity

('Social Function of Poetry' 18-19). Heidegger bases the distinctiveness of the German nation

on the fact that it is Germany which went back to the pre-Socratics, and which attempted to

achieve what the ancient Greeks left unachieved. German philosophy succeeded in

recovering the authentic concept of technè, which is also a concept of Dichtung. Germany's

particularity derives from its rediscovery of the essence of poetry. Heidegger also grounds the

vocation of Germany to philosophy in the German language: certain key phrases in

Heidegger's philosophy cannot be translated from German without paraphrasing two

meanings separately which in German are both stated and (more importantly) thought

together (es gibt Zeit: there is and it gives time). And it is language which makes possible the

irruption of Dasein and the questioning of Being. 74 This similarity is grounded on another,

which concerns the relationship to philosophical tradition argued for by both writers. Both

73Eliot argues that the substitution of something analogous to Heidegger's technical expertise, for an

analogue of Heidegger's technè, is a cause of the provincialism of time: 'In our age, when men seem

more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to

solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there comes into existence a new kind of provincialism

[provincialism of time]' ('What is a Classic?' 69). Cf. also Notes Ch. 5, 88-89 and 'Catholicism and

International Order' (1933) 116-117. Essays Ancient and Modern. London: Faber, 1936. 113-135.

74Cf. Clark, 'Being in Mime' 1009-1011.

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see themselves as attempting to renew a past philosophical tradition: the age of Dante for

Eliot, the pre-Socratics for Heidegger; Heidegger's relationship of

Auseinandersetzung toward philosophical tradition is similar to that advocated by Eliot. 75

Both also identify crisis points in history when the wisdom of the period on which they base

their projects was occulted: Plato for Heidegger, the Reformation for Eliot, and Descartes for

both at various times. 76

4. Eliot and Valéry (and Coleridge)

Eliot differs from Heidegger on an important point, which has important consequences for his

relationship to the aesthetic. The respective exemplary periods in which both writers see their

contemporary project as being rooted are different, and represent opposing values. Eliot, in

contrasting Bradley with Leibnitz, argues that the systematic and complete nature of

Bradley's philosophy means that it will yield less to subsequent studies: 'He has the

melancholy grace, the languid mastery, of the late product. He has expounded one type of

philosophy with such consummate ability that it will probably not survive him.' However, 'In

Leibnitz there are possibilities. He has the permanence of the pre-Socratics, of all imperfect

things' ('Leibnitz' Monads' 207). 77 Eliot does not devalorise the pre-Socratics: he regards

them as being part of tradition - even to a greater extent than Bradley - because their

imperfection leaves scope for future writers to say something about them. However, they are

far from unique on that score: Eliot compares them to Leibnitz, whom Eliot regards as part of

the metaphysics which privileged the subject. Heidegger, by contrast, regards the pre-

75Cf. 'La transcendance' 163 and 171-173.

76Cf. 'Clark Lecture # 2' 80-81 for Eliot, and 'La transcendence' 157-158 for Heidegger.

77To my knowledge, Eliot's only other reference to the pre-Socratics is his discussion of a number of

pre-Socratic philosophers, as inferior philosophical poets to Dante, in 'Dante' (1920) 160-161. Sacred

Wood. 159-171.
 376

Socratics as the model for the vocation of the German people to philosophy. The German

people's vocation is to rediscover the concept of alètheia which the pre-Socratics possessed,

and which was occluded by Platonism. And the relationship of the German people to the pre-

Socratics is governed by a paradoxical form of imitation. Because the pre-Socratics are

inimitable, the German people can imitate them only by not imitating them, by being as

inimitable as them. 78

Eliot's remark is doubly offensive then to Heidegger's view of the pre-Socratics: he

regards them, not as inimitable, but as representative, and as similar to Leibnitz, who belongs

to the heart of the philosophical tradition which, for Heidegger, occluded the truth of the pre-

Socratics. And Eliot's respect for the pre-Socratics, as permanent and unfinished, is, by

comparison to Heidegger's, archi-conventional. He regards them as the authors of wise

fragments, which leave future generations much to ponder because of their fragmentary

nature, but not because of their purchase on a truth which is denied to post-Socratic writers.

The point of the comparison is to illuminate Leibnitz, and to say that he is, like the pre-

Socratics, interesting because fragmentary.

We have touched above (Intro., § 4 and Ch. 1, § 2 n) on Dr. Karfik's suggestion that

the privileged relationship between the Greeks and the Germans was, for Heidegger, an

essentially Protestant one. Just as Luther presents his authentic reading of the Bible as an

alternative to the Latin and Catholic one, Heidegger presents his reading of the Greeks as an

alternative to the Latinising and Christian filter through which they have been read by

metaphysics. For all his critique of Plato, Heidegger is a respectful reader of him and of

Aristotle, 79 in contrast to his lack of interest in neo-Platonic and Christian philosophy. 80 And,

78Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, 'La césure du spéculatif' 53-55, and 'Hölderlin et les Grecs' (1979). L'imitation

des Modernes. 71-84.

79Cf. Nietzsche I, Ch. 10, 64-65 and Lacoue-Labarthe, 'La transcendance' 166.
 377

for all his critique of German idealism by comparison with his own philosophy, Heidegger

grounds his attempt to begin again the pre-Socratics on the German idealist attempt to read

the post-Socratic Greeks. This attempt was initiated, of course, by Kant, and extended via

Hegel and Nietzsche to Husserl. 81 Heidegger before the Kehre explicitly invokes Kant and

Nietzsche as models for the return of the Germans to the Greeks. 82 The inimitability and

mimetic relationship of the Germans to the pre-Socratics is founded, for Heidegger, on a

rejection of Latin and Catholic Christianity, for which the model is Luther, and which was

initiated in the domain of philosophy by Kant. 83

Eliot's concept of tradition is diametrically opposed to Heidegger's:

When we consider the western world, we must recognise that the main cultural

tradition has been that corresponding to the Church of Rome. Only within the last

four hundred years has any other manifested itself; and anyone with a sense of centre

80This is for example, Lacoue-Labarthe argues, what motivates Heidegger's suspicion of Longinus

('Vérité Sublime' 115).

81Hence, we also find Heidegger, at the same time as he criticises it, granting speculative philosophy a

credit which he does not extend to the Philosophy which unfolds in the hiatus between Aristotle and

Kant (cf. Nietzsche Ch. 10).

82Cf. 'La transcendence' 157-158.

83Lacoue-Labarthe notices however ('Vérité sublime' 111 n 23) that Heidegger accepts Bamberg

Cathedral and Dürer as great art (cf. 'Origin of the Work of Art' and Nietzsche Ch. 22, 186-87), even

though these fall between the two periods valorised by Heidegger: neither is classical, nor part of the

German attempt to renew Greek tragedy. One might suggest, in Dürer's case, that Heidegger's liking

derives from his admiration for the Reformation.

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and periphery must admit that the western tradition has been Latin, and Latin means

Rome (Notes Ch. 4, 73). 84

As we shall see below, this means that Eliot bases his project on the medieval tradition which

Heidegger sidelines. But two other consequences ensue. Firstly, the Reformation's opposition

to Rome, I would argue, was a nationalistic one. The demand that Mass be heard in the

vulgate was part of a wider movement which asserted the autonomy of nations based on their

language of worship against the wider unity of Europe based on common worship in Latin.

The difference is reflected in Eliot and Heidegger. Heidegger's view of Germany as the

country of authentic philosophy reasserts it distinctiveness vis-à-vis other countries, which

was first asserted by the reformation; Heidegger's Protestant relationship to Greece is also a

nationalistic one. Eliot's use of Roman Christianity as reference point means that his concept

of the relationship to tradition is, by contrast, a European one. 85

Secondly, the Reformation was an iconoclastic movement, and Heidegger's

opposition to aesthetics is made in the name of an iconoclastic concept of art. 86 Eliot's

concept of art, as we shall find below (§ 5), is fundamentally iconophilic, even to the point of

making it possible to abstract an aesthetic position from his poetics. What I am going to

84Although Eliot thinks that Greek 'is a much greater language' than Latin ('Virgil and the Christian

World' 124), he argues that the Latin world is an improvement on the Greek, because it is closer to the

Christian (124-125). It is because of this that Eliot can say that 'it is only through Rome that our

parentage to Greece can be traced' ('What is a Classic?' 70).

85Eliot describes the Reformation as an essentially nationalistic movement in 'Clark Lecture # 2' 78.

86Lacoue-Labarthe argues that Heidegger's notion of art nonetheless presupposes a fundamental

mimetology in two respects: the mimetic relationship of the Germans to the Greeks, and the

representation of physis by technè. This representation (without representation) is the sublime law

which we discussed in Chapter 1, § 1.

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examine is the manner in which Eliot attempts to reintegrate aesthetics into his project, with

reference to his writing on Valéry. Our comparison of Eliot with Heidegger enables us to

glimpse that his iconic and European outlook might have a common source. The stakes of the

reintegration of the aesthetic, particularly an iconic aesthetic, will lead us back to Dante, the

source of Eliot's icono-European outlook.

Eliot's view of Valéry is a differentiated one. He argues that Valéry represents the

end-point of self-conscious criticism, which is synonymous with nineteenth century criticism

for Eliot (cf. 'Experiment'). To understand Eliot’s relationship to Valéry, we must briefly

examine his discussion of Coleridge, who Eliot describes in similar terms to Valéry, and

whom he regards as having initiated the movement of which Valéry is the endpoint; 87

Coleridge and Valéry mark the beginning and the end of the aesthetic which Eliot attempts to

delimit. However, Eliot holds both critics in high regard. It is by understanding his

ambiguous attitude to Coleridge and Valéry that we understand Eliot's attitude to the

aesthetic. And his critique of Valéry is anticipated in Valéry's critique of his own aesthetic;

Eliot’s Auseinandersetzung with Valéry puts him in contact with the debate which we have

been following in this thesis, and provides the context for the articulation of his own position.

The ambiguity of Eliot's relationship to Coleridge is most marked in 'Experiment in

Criticism'. There Eliot argues that Sainte-Beuve, not Coleridge, marks the beginning of self-

conscious criticism. But although he demarcates Coleridge from the advent of self-

consciousness in criticism, he at the same time makes him a harbinger of it. Although Eliot

87'The criticism of to-day, indeed, may be said to be in direct descent from Coleridge, who would […],

were he alive now, take the same interest in the social sciences and in the study of language and

semantics, that he took in the sciences available to him' ('Frontiers of Criticism' 104). I have argued that

Coleridge's criticism both conforms to and deconstructs Kant's aesthetics in ‘Platonic

Memory/Romantic Imagination.' Q/W/E/R/T/Y (forthcoming). App. IV.

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simplifies his position in 'Frontiers', the ambiguity of his treatment of Coleridge in

'Experiment' remains. Eliot consistently ranks Coleridge among the most important English

critics. 88 In 1920, Eliot's admiration for Coleridge, I will suggest, is caused by Eliot's

awareness of something in Coleridge which demarcates him from the self-consciousness for

which Eliot also made him responsible.

The essential elements of Eliot's critical attitude toward Coleridge are contained in

'Experiment': 'modern criticism begins with the work of the French critic Sainte-Beuve, that is

to say about the year 1826. Before him, Coleridge had attempted a new type of criticism, a

type which is in some respects allied to what is now called aesthetics than to literary

criticism' ('Experiment' 199). Eliot's suspicion of aesthetics is articulated with most clarity in

his discussion of Coleridge: aesthetics and criticism are presented as alternatives, and

Coleridge's proximity to aesthetics rather than literary criticism is stated at the same time as

his proximity to self-consciousness in criticism. However, Coleridge's position in

'Experiment' - as preceding self-consciousness but not belonging to it - grants him a special

status:

But this change [the advent of self-consciousness] is preceded, so far as literary

criticism is concerned - by a freakish phenomenon, by a book written by one of the

wisest and most foolish men of his time and perhaps the most extraordinary; a book

which is itself one of the wisest and silliest, the most exciting and exasperating books

of criticism ever written - the Biographia Literaria of Coleridge (202).

88Cf. 'To Criticize' 11, 13 and 17, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound Intro., xiii, and 'The Perfect Critic' 1.

Eliot also gives Coleridge the credit for discovering Donne (a discovery with which Eliot had been

credited) in 'To Criticize' 21. Raymond Williams offers an interesting account of the similarities

between Coleridge and Eliot's conservatism in 'T. S. Eliot' 144-145 and 148. The Criticism and General

Essays. 144-156/ reprinted from Culture and Society 1780-1950. London: 1958. Ch. 3.
 381

Coleridge's status as preceding modern criticism makes him what might be called 'inouï'

('unheard of') in French: he is a freak, a one off. This amounts to saying that Coleridge is not

just distinguished from self-consciousness, but from all movements of criticism. And in his

uniqueness also lies the ambiguity of Eliot's valuation (wise and foolish, exciting and

exasperating). Biographia, Eliot argues, 'contains specimens of several types of criticism',

none of which however are adequate as a description of Coleridge: Coleridge is trying to

defend the poetry he is writing (which affiliates him to the critic as practitioner with which

Eliot classifies himself) (202-203), 89 but 'although he had not the historical point of view'

which characterises self-conscious criticism, he also has a catholic appreciation of poetry

from different periods which 'anticipate[s] some of the most useful accomplishments of the

historical method' (203). The critic/practitioner and self-conscious critic are opposed to each

other to a certain extent by Eliot, and Coleridge's freak status differentiates him from both.

Eliot does offer one defining characteristic for Coleridge:

But one thing that Coleridge did effect for literary criticism is this. He brought out

clearly the relation of literary criticism to that branch of philosophy which has

flourished amazingly under the name of aesthetics; and, following German writers

whom he had studied, he puts the criticism of literature in its place as merely one

department of the theoretic study of the fine arts in general. […] And he establishes

literary criticism as a part of philosophy: or, to put it more moderately, he made it

necessary for the 'literary critic' to acquaint himself with general philosophy and

metaphysics ('Experiment' 203).

89Cf. also Use of Poetry Intro., 6 and 'The Perfect Critic' 18-19.
 382

As we have argued above, aesthetics is defined by the manner in which it defines literature;

by the way it gives literature a particular place and function in relation to dialectic

philosophy. Coleridge, Eliot argues, is responsible for relating criticism to a discipline called

'aesthetics', which, as a 'branch of philosophy', corresponds to the definition of aesthetics we

have been developing. And the very act by which he does so is aesthetic according to that

same definition: he puts literary criticism 'in its place, as merely one department' of

theoretical philosophy, he 'establishes criticism as a part of philosophy'. Eliot argues that

Coleridge belongs to the aesthetic, against which he elsewhere articulates his theory of the

non-definition of poetry and his critique of personality. Eliot also calls the German writers

'romantic German philosophers', and their philosophy 'German idealism' (202). Eliot equates

that philosophy with aesthetics and the metaphysical dualism on which the subject is based. 90

Eliot repeatedly takes Coleridge to task because he represents aesthetic criticism. 91

Eliot's argues that self-consciousness is intimately related to the German philosophy

which Coleridge's distinctive achievement is to have brought to bear on criticism. 92 From this

point of view, the change in 'Frontiers' in which Coleridge replaces Sainte-Beuve as origin of

self-conscious criticism was inevitable. Before we examine this point, we must examine a

consequence of Eliot's affiliation of Coleridge with aesthetics. Coleridge represents a certain

kind of inspiration for Eliot, an inspiration which is closely linked to the metaphysics which

Coleridge brought to bear on criticism:

90Cf. 'Turnbull Lectures # 3' 285, 'Wordsworth and Coleridge' 68, 'Second Thoughts About Humanism'

(1929) 484. Selected Essays Pt. VII, 481-491, 'Clark Lectures # 2' 80-81, Knowledge and

Experience Ch. 2, 33-34, Ch. 3 59-60 n***, Ch. 4, 84, 97 and 100.

91Cf. 'Johnson' 191, 'Wordsworth and Coleridge' 72, 'Dryden the Critic' 725 and 'The Perfect Critic' 12-

13.

92Cf. his discussion of Hegel in 'The Failure of Amiel' (1935). P. Mansell Jones. French Introspectives

from Montaigne to André Gide. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1937. Chapter 7, 77-91.
 383

It was better for Coleridge, as poet, to read books of travel and exploration than to

read books of metaphysics and political economy. He did genuinely want to read

books of metaphysics and political economy, for he had a certain talent for such

subjects. But for a few years he had been visited by the Muse (I know of no poet to

whom this hackneyed metaphor is better applicable) and thenceforth was a haunted

man; for anyone who has ever been visited by the Muse is thenceforth haunted

('Wordsworth and Coleridge' 59-60).

Eliot concludes the lectures by saying that he too fears the haunting which he ascribes to

Coleridge. And his refusal to define poetry during that conclusion is directly related to the

haunting of inspiration:

I fear that I have already, throughout these lectures, trespassed beyond the bounds

which a little self-knowledge tells me are my proper frontier. If, as James Thomson

observed, 'lips only sing when they cannot kiss,' it may also be that poets only talk

when they cannot sing. I am content to leave my theorising about poetry at this point.

The sad ghost of Coleridge beckons to me from the shadows (149).

Although these words work as a self-deprecating joke, they reveal that Coleridge represents

for Eliot the loss of creative powers, and their substitution with the theoretical (and echoes

again the distinction between self-conscious critics and practitioner-critics). In that context,

Eliot writes that Biographia was written by Coleridge after his creative powers 'deserted him'

(58; cf. also 60), and makes a circumstantial link between that desertion and metaphysics: '…

had deserted him, and when the disastrous effects of long dissipation and stupefaction of his

powers in transcendental metaphysics were bringing him to a state of lethargy.' Each time
 384

Eliot mentions Coleridge's haunting by the Muse he once knew, he also mentions his

metaphysics.

Eliot attempts to define poetry in a manner which will escape definition, and thereby

escape aesthetics. Poetry must rewrite tradition as something it had not said, or rewrite the

other as something he is not yet. Coleridge however, according to Eliot, makes his own

poetry impossible by theorising about poetry, because defining poetry in the manner of

metaphysics programmes in advance what poetry will do. In so doing, poetry becomes unable

to create something new, and therefore to succeed in its vocation. When Coleridge loses his

inspiration, he writes a book on poetry according to which poetry cannot be poetry. 93 We saw

also that Eliot's preference for criticism of poets by poets whose poetry they influenced

corresponded to the belief that criticism had to be inspired creatively by poetry. The

Biographia, Eliot says, was written when that sort of criticism was no longer possible for

Coleridge (or at least not to the same degree). Eliot calls Biographia an aesthetic work, and

describes it immanently as a work which corresponds to the definition of aesthetics which we

have been following: a criticism which programmes art and in so doing cannot understand the

novelty which art must create. The aesthetic which Coleridge represents for Eliot is also

based on a particular concept of inspiration, which links the sensual to the supersensual.

Eliot's discussion of Coleridge's inspiration is critical (a 'hackneyed concept'), but also

suggests an awareness both of the role of inspiration in the aesthetic he (Eliot) is criticising.

93'I believe that for a poet to be also a philosopher he would have to be virtually two men […]

Coleridge is the apparent example, but I believe that he was only able to exercise the one activity at the

expense of the other' ('Shelley and Keats' 90). Cf. 'A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry'

13. Paul Valéry. Le Serpent. Trans. Mark Wardle. London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1924. 7-15.
 385

The relationship between Valéry and Coleridge, as end and beginning of the 'modern'

and self-conscious tendency, is suggested by Eliot when he presents French Symbolism as the

successor of English Romanticism:

In the final years of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, the

Romantic movement in England dominated. But in the second half of the nineteenth

century the greatest contribution to European poetry was certainly made in France. I

refer to the tradition which starts with Baudelaire, and culminates with Paul Valéry

('Unity of European Culture # 1' 112).

We also cited above (Ch. 3, § 1) Eliot's description of the same three poets as constituting 'the

most important "movement" in the world of poetry since that of Wordsworth and

Coleridge'. 94 Symbolism relays Romanticism, just as Valéry brings to an end the movement

and the era started by Coleridge. At the same time, we can already notice a demarcation of

Symbolism from self-consciousness. By making the French Symbolists the greatest

contributors to poetry, Eliot implicitly demotes the contribution of the English Victorians. It

is against the latter that Eliot makes his criticism of self-consciousness and dissociation of

sensibility most harshly. By making the Symbolists representative of the movement, Eliot

also suggests that they might show the way beyond it.

There is one unmistakable parallel between Coleridge and Valéry, and that,

paradoxically, is the status which Eliot gives them as unique, and unrelated to critical

tradition. Eliot writes that 'Valéry's art poétique is inspired by different motives, and directed

to different ends, from any of the treatises, essays, or scattered dicta of other poets, with the

94'Foreword' v. Joseph Chiari. Symbolisme from Poe to Mallarmé: The Growth of a Myth. London:

Rockliff, 1956. v-viii.

 386

single exception of Poe, from Horace to the present day.'95 In this, Valéry is distinguished

from poets who write in defence of the writing they themselves practice: 'Amongst such

writings are the essays of Dryden, the prefaces of Wordsworth, and (in part) Coleridge's

Biographia Literaria' (x). Eliot, in distinguishing Valéry from all other kinds of criticism

except for Poe, must also distinguish him from Coleridge, who was given a similar unique

status in 'Experiment'. That uniqueness is retained by the '(in part)', which considers

Coleridge as not wholly belonging to the group in which he is included. Eliot makes a similar

distinction when he writes that 'the nearest we get to pure literary criticism is the criticism of

artists writing about their own art; and for this I turn to Johnson, and Wordsworth and

Coleridge. (Paul Valéry's is a special case)' ('To Criticize' 26). Like Coleridge (and therefore

unlike him), Valéry enjoys a unique status. In the case of Coleridge, in 'Experiment', that

status differentiated him from the dichterisch critic-poet, but equally from self-conscious

criticism, while still suggesting that he was related to it. Coleridge inaugurates the movement

of self-conscious criticism while suggesting the means of differentiating oneself from it.

Eliot would seem here to contradict his remark that there is 'a continuity of

development of poetic theory' in Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry. If so, then surely

Baudelaire and Mallarmé should be included, along with Poe, as exceptions to Valéry's

difference from all other critics. It could be said that Baudelaire and Mallarmé are considered

as conceptual derivatives of Poe, and that 'Poe' names them by synecdoche. But Eliot's

statement also seems to recognise the fact that, for all their similarities with Baudelaire and

Mallarmé, Poe and Valéry are distinguished from the first two by their preoccupation with

the creative process. The contradiction is resolved if we understand that Valéry's uniqueness

works in a similar manner to Coleridge's: he represents the accomplishment and dead-end of

95Introduction' x. CWV VII, vii-xiv.

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self-consciousness 96 - and in that respect is related to Baudelaire and Mallarmé - and at the

same time the possibility of demarcation from it - and in that respect is unique.

The only critic similar to Valéry, according to Eliot, is Poe. As we saw in our

analysis of Baudelaire, French Symbolism read Kant's aesthetics in Poe: Eliot also attributes

the source of the aesthetic brought to fruition in Valéry to Poe, without realising (and in this

he shares the unconsciousness of Baudelaire's 'Gautier') that its 'source' is in Kant. But Eliot

does display an oblique awareness of this fact. Valéry is only comparable to Poe, says Eliot,

but he also says that the English figure who is comparable to Poe is Coleridge (who is the

only literary figure who is comparably incomparable with Valéry): 'We suspect, indeed, that

if the French poets had known […] English literature better they would have based their

aesthetics not on that of Poe but on that of Coleridge' (Chiari, Symbolisme Forew., vi);

Coleridge represents German idealism for Eliot. Although Eliot may not have been

consciously aware of the fact that Poe's aesthetics are Kant's, his scattered remarks on Poe,

Coleridge and Valéry imply it, albeit circuitously.

After distinguishing Valéry's motives from those of other critics, Eliot writes that 'He

is perpetually engaged in solving an insoluble puzzle - the puzzle of how poetry gets written'

(xi). This is what distinguishes him and Poe from the other two Symbolists. But in 'From Poe

to Valéry', Eliot presents Coleridge as an English equivalent of Poe because of his

preoccupation with precisely that question:

Of course, a far greater than Poe had already studied the poetic process. In the

Biographia Literaria Coleridge is concerned primarily, of course, with the poetry of

96Eliot writes that in his description of the poet as scientist, to which Eliot affiliates Valéry's formalism,

'Valéry invents the role which is to make him representative of the twentieth [century]' (CWV VII,

xviii).
 388

Wordsworth; and he does not pursue his philosophical enquiries concurrently with

the writing of his poetry; but he does anticipate the question which fascinated Valéry:

'What am I doing when I write a poem?' (41).

This rounds off our discussion of Eliot's view of Coleridge. The reservations are still there:

although he is defending Wordsworth's poetry, and by implication the poetry he had written

or wanted to write, Coleridge represents a philosophical approach to art which is

incompatible with writing poetry, and therefore with an authentic appreciation of it. But

Coleridge is also similar to Poe - who in the 'Introduction' to CWV VII is the only critic along

with Valéry to be preoccupied with the creative process - because he too is preoccupied with

the creative process. This thesis up till now has traced the question of the creative process

from Plato to Baudelaire via Kant. Eliot confronts this question, but confronts it through his

confrontation with Valéry (and Poe (and Coleridge)).

In saying that Valéry's essays cannot be classified under the typical headings of

criticism, Eliot recognises a certain demarcation from the aesthetic on Valéry's part, a

demarcation which we verified in Chapter 3. This is also suggested by the terms in which

Eliot sees the relationship of French Symbolism to Poe. Eliot argues that Baudelaire (along

with Mallarmé and Valéry), may 'have seen something in Poe that English-speaking readers

may have missed' ('From Poe to Valéry' 28); 97 the French Symbolists improve Poe by

rewriting and interpreting his work in a way which is superior to the original. 98 In so doing,

they produce something which cannot be said to already exist in Poe's writing, but which, at

the same time, is derived from his writing and would not exist without it. They in effect

deconstruct Poe by reading him beyond his limitations. This gesture corresponds to Eliot's

97The French reception of Poe continues to be favourable, as exemplified by Barthes, Lacan and

Derrida.

98'From Poe to Valéry' 27-28, 31 and 36.

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notion of tradition. At the same time as Valéry is comparable only to Poe, and representative

of aesthetics, he also represents the possibility of a productive reading of that aesthetic.

Moreover, Eliot leaves out another famous critic who is concerned with that

question, Eliot himself:

I am, as you may already have noted with impatience, curious about the process by

which anything gets written: I am the more tempted to indulge this curiosity on the

present occasion, because the Centre Meditérranéen is closely associated in my mind

with the name of the great explorer of thought, feeling and language who was Paul

Valéry. 99

By now, Eliot may have seemed to have piled self-contradiction upon self-contradiction. The

once unique Valéry is like Poe, and like Poe for the same reasons as Poe is like Coleridge

(who used to be himself unique) - and now he is like Eliot! This apparent contradiction stems

from Eliot's attempt to describe Coleridge and Valéry's differentiated relationship of

simultaneous belonging and demarcation from the aesthetic. Eliot writes that Coleridge and

Valéry are each unique, rather than both different from the aesthetic in similar manner,

because they represent the beginning and the end of that aesthetic (in the field of criticism),

and are in that sense absolutely different from one another. Eliot is concerned with the

99'Scylla and Charybdis' (1952) 5. Agenda 23:1-2 (Spring-Summer 1985). 5-21. Eliot manifests his

affinity with Valéry on the subject of interest in the process of poetic creation in an oblique manner

when he writes: 'Valéry's account of the genesis, maturation, and completion of a poem cannot fail to

arouse responses of both assent and dissent from other poets. There are moments when I feel that an

experience of Valéry's has some correspondence with my own: when he has recorded some process

which I recognize and of which he has made me for the first time fully conscious' (CWV VII, Intro.,

xxi).
 390

demarcation which they both represent, and in order to bring it about himself, he must at the

same time demarcate himself from them, assert their uniqueness in order to safeguard his.

Eliot's relationship to Valéry and Coleridge, and their relationship to the aesthetic, functions

according to the logic of tradition. The aesthetic in literature for Eliot, as represented by

Milton and the nineteenth century, was defined by a privileging of the self and a

corresponding unrelation to tradition. In attempting to adopt a traditional attitude to

aesthetics, Eliot attempts to reintegrate it into tradition. From that perspective, there is no

contradiction in the three (or four including Poe) writers all being the same and unique at the

same time. And this leads us back to the mimetic rivalry of Eliot with Valéry: by making him

representative of the end of the nineteenth century in the twentieth, Eliot liberates for himself

the possibility of continuing beyond that end. 100 In both cases, Valéry represents both the

dead-end and the possibility of a new beginning.

To discuss the ambiguity of Eliot's position vis-à-vis Valéry, we must begin by

separating the issues on which Eliot criticises him from those on which he praises him.

Valéry, Eliot argues, 'was the most self-conscious of poets' (39). Eliot's discussion of self-

consciousness in relation to Valéry makes explicit certain aspects of it which had before only

been implicit. Eliot argues in 'From Poe to Valéry' that Valéry's excessive formalism

represents the final stage in the development of a certain form of literary self-consciousness.

At the most primitive stage, Eliot argues, attention was directed wholly to the object of the

poem, without consciousness of its style. Later, man becomes conscious of the style and the

content, and at a further stage the subject matter becomes merely 'a necessary means for the

realization of the poem' (38). Mowbray Allan writes: 'I believe that Eliot thought of the

100Eliot writes of the aesthetics of the Symbolists, two sentences before describing them as

representatives of self-consciousness (cf. below, n): 'Without this aesthetic I do not think that the work

of some other modern writers would be quite what it is (I am thinking of Rilke, for example, and of

some of my own later work)' (Chiari, Symbolisme Forew., vi).

 391

unified sensibility as becoming dissociated when the poet becomes increasingly self-

conscious: when he becomes aware, that is, of his ideas, images and feelings as distinct from

the objects that caused them' (T. S. Eliot's Impersonal Theory of Poetry 80). When Eliot

writes that '[t]hat process of increasing self-consciousness - or, we may say, of increasing

consciousness of language - has as its theoretical goal what we may call la poésie pure'

(39), 101 he seems to support the idea that formalism and the privileging of personality go

hand in hand. Valéry, on this score, is condemned by Eliot along similar lines to D. H.

Lawrence, for expressing his personality rather than conforming to tradition, being interested

in his subjective appreciation of the object rather than the object itself, of feeling subjectively

without thinking objectively.

It is true that Eliot criticises Valéry for being self-conscious in this sense: 'He returns

perpetually to the same insoluble problems. It would almost seem that the only object of his

curiosity was - himself' (CWV VII, xxiii). Eliot writes earlier:

[Valéry] is perpetually involved in solving an insoluble puzzle - the puzzle of how

poetry gets written; and the material on which he works is his own poetry. In the end,

the question is simply: how did I write La Jeune Parque […]? The questions with

which he is preoccupied are questions which no poet of an earlier generation would

have raised; they are questions which belong to the present self-conscious century

(xi).

Eliot does not explain why Valéry's formalism and his narcissism should be related. Valéry's

formalism is however, I would argue, similar to the aesthetic which Eliot elsewhere describes

as self-conscious. He criticises Valéry's analogy between poetry and prose on one hand, and

101Cf. 'But this poetic current [Symbolism] represents a particular development of self-consciousness in

the poetry of the last hundred years' (Chiari, Symbolisme Forew., vi-vii).
 392

dancing and walking on the other: 'Prose, Valéry maintains, is instrumental: its purpose is to

convey a meaning, to impart information, to convince of a truth' (xv). 102 What Valéry

attempts to distinguish poetry from is one of the tendencies into which the dissociation of

sensibility split British poetry (according to Eliot): on one side intellect and meaning, on the

other form. Eliot's earliest extended discussion of Valéry makes a similar point: 'And if Mr.

Valéry is in error in his complete exorcism of "philosophy," perhaps the basis of his error is

the apparently commendatory interpretation of the effort of the modern poet, namely, that the

latter endeavours to "produce in us a state."'103 Prose and philosophy are excluded by Valéry

on the same terms, as we have discussed above. And the freedom which such an exclusion

makes possible, is, and in this Eliot reads correctly, a kind of subjective gratification of the

reader. This is the first characteristic of the aesthetic. Valéry's radical distinction between

prose and poetry is attended by the risk that '[t]he words set free from the restrictions of prose

may tend to form a separate language' (xvi), which is also the danger realised by the poetry of

Milton. As with Milton, this risk is implicated in the attempt to make poetry approximate to

music: 'In assimilating poetry to music, Valéry has, it seems to me, failed to insist upon its

relation to speech' (xvi-xvii). Meaning is connected for Eliot with a relationship to the world

outside the poet, music and form to the gratification of the individual.

Eliot argues elsewhere that such a devotion to art for art's sake merely substitutes art

for other things. 104 Valéry's formalism is different, however. A submission to pure form, one

might argue, could be considered to be a submission to an absolute alterity (form exists

independently from what human beings do with it, and actually governs what human beings

do with language). In order to grasp the fact that this submission is a form of self-

102Eliot writes that prose is closer to common speech in 'What is a Classic?' 56.

103'Dante' (1920) 160. Sacred Wood. 159-171. Eliot also writes that 'a state, in itself, is nothing

whatever', and that 'Valéry's account is quite in harmony with pragmatic doctrine' (170).

104Cf. Use of Poetry Intro., 17 and 'Experiment' 208.

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consciousness, we must resort to the argument deployed during our reading of formalism, and

which we derive from Valéry. Two positions can be distinguished in Valéry's work. The first

concerns the poem's relation to music, as representative of pure form. The poem cannot

achieve the condition of pure form because of the unavoidable signifying value of language.

However, such a condition remains as a telos, which could only be reached by the

Aufhebung of the content which negates it. The second concerns the poet's ability to create

works of poetry, defined as those works which approximate to the condition of music. Here,

the world of form becomes more radically elusive. According to the first condition, it would

have been possible to write a purely formal work simply by writing a piece of music (instead

of a poem). The formal work would be an aesthetic one in the limited aesthetic sense of

sensual gratification. In that sense, the approximation to music and to form indeed

corresponds to a form of aesthetic self-consciousness, in which freedom from the constraints

of reality leaves the subject better able to be gratified (this is the self-consciousness which

Eliot identifies in Valéry).

But Valéry adds the supplementary proposition that the poem (and the music to

which it aspires) is also creator of a kind of spiritual wealth which goes beyond anything

human, an infinite gift which exceeds finite subjective gratification. The poet can only create

this work of pure form by being inspired (or else his work would not be pure form, but

contaminated by the real world). Such inspiration, Valéry argues, reduces the poet to a

passive medium. But reduction to a passive medium is in fact the apotheosis of personality,

and this for two different reasons. 1. Eliot argues that possession is always possession by

another personality, and takes place when the possessing and possessed personalities do not

exist in relation to tradition and community, in other words do not authentically submit

before the other. 2. Inspiration, as we argued above, allows the poet to reach the

supersensual. By reaching the supersensual, and becoming a medium for it, the poet,

according to the law of the dialectic, reappropriates the supersensual. His finitude as human
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being is overcome by his contact with the divine. Passive inspiration is the realisation of the

speculative dialectic. Inspiration achieves the most advanced form of self-consciousness, in

which the self no longer stands in opposition to the absolute. This moreover programmes the

poet's act of creation, not only because he is passive, but because the poem will always

represent the supersensual in one form or another. Inspiration sublates the contingent which

(by refusing to be reduced to the dialectical programme), I have suggested in my reading of

Eliot, is the condition of the poem's being a poem. Eliot's argument that Valéry's formalism is

related to his self-consciousness is not based on this argument, but is nonetheless supported

by it.

In this respect, Valéry's poetics, as interpreted by Eliot, can be seen as corresponding

to only part of Eliot's definition of poetry. Eliot agrees with Valéry's 'insistence that poetry

must first of all be enjoyed, if it is to be of any use at all; that it must be enjoyed as poetry,

and not for any other reason' (xvii). But what is lacking in Valéry's self-conscious and

formalist account is that

It provides us with no criterion of seriousness. He is deeply concerned with the

problem of process, of how the poem is made, but not with the question of how it is

related to the rest of life in such a way as to give the reader the shock of feeling that

the poem has been […] a serious experience. I mean here, not an isolable event,

having its value solely in itself and not in relation to anything else, but something that

has been entered and fused with a multitude of other experiences in the formation of

the person that the reader is developing into (xxiii). 105

105Eliot seems to use the word 'serious' to indicate a concern with subject matter which is neither

formalist nor didactic. Cf. Sacred Wood Intro., xiii and 'Imperfect Critics' 43
 395

Eliot's concept of serious experience is explained in language reminiscent of his thesis on

Bradley: it exists only 'in relation' to other things. It is also open-ended, because related to

past experience and ready to be related to future experience. Serious experience is also, in its

relatedness, analogous to tradition. And the developing person is changed by serious

experience. The relationship to seriousness involves the influence of the person from the

outside; a person who is constituted from the outside. Eliot opposes to this a lack of concern

with the relationship of poetry to the rest of life. Eliot's non-aesthetic definition of poetry

defines it as something different from other activities, but always relating to them.106 Valéry,

Eliot suggests, by not relating poetry to the rest of life, allows it to remain in its aesthetic and

programmed definition. The problem of the definition of literature is intimately connected

with the possibility of creating the new, which itself is intimately connected with the

possibility of submitting to the other. There is, therefore, an analogy between the non-serious

event and the formalist definition of poetry: both exist in isolation. Eliot's implicit argument

is twofold therefore: by not relating poetry to the rest of life, Valéry perpetuates one kind of

literary self-consciousness, and this involves him in a second kind of personal self-

consciousness, by separating the poem from the serious experience which (de-)constitutes the

subject. That is, according to Eliot, why the alternative to serious experience is the study of

the poetic process: instead of being influenced from the outside, the poet is absorbed in

himself.

It is therefore right to say that Eliot criticises Valéry's self-absorption and formalism

together as self-conscious, but this requires an explanation of why he nonetheless thought

Valéry's theories so fruitful, why he thought that the 'tradition' which unites the French

Symbolists has produced poets which Eliot admires and enjoys, and why it is 'the most

interesting development of poetic consciousness anywhere in that same one hundred years',

and valuable 'for its own sake' ('From Poe to Valéry' 42). The first reason corresponds to what

106Cf. The preface (1928) to Sacred Wood, and 'Frontiers'.

 396

at first might seem like a contradiction between Eliot's discussion of Valéry in 1947, 1948

and 1958, and a text written on Valéry in 1924. 107 That piece unites in a lucid manner the

main elements of Eliot's notion of tradition, which he uses Valéry to illustrate. Originality is

the condition of tradition (and vice versa):

We are so accustomed, in considering contemporary English poetry, to identify

tradition with lack of invention, and on the other hand originality with oddity; […] It

is difficult for us […] to understand that the unity and uniformity of the French mind

is such that what appear traditional and revolutionary are only movements within one

tradition (7). 108

He also writes, at first sight in total contradiction with his critique of Valéry's self-absorption,

that Valéry's poetry epitomises a kind of reticence vis-à-vis Valéry the man (11-12), and the

same impersonality as described in Part II of 'Tradition':

One is prepared for art when one has ceased to be interested in one's own emotions

and experiences except as material; and when one has reached this point of

indifference one will pick and choose according to very different principles from the

principles of those people who are still excited by their own feelings and passionately

enthusiastic about their own passions. […] [N]ot our feelings, but the pattern which

we may make of our feelings, is the centre of value (12).

107'A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry.' Paul Valéry. Le Serpent. Trans. Mark Wardle.

London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1924. 7-15.

108Eliot does not elsewhere describe tradition or the French mind as 'uniform', and the phrase is

uncharacteristic. So too is the argument that French poetry is traditional, not English. But in this we can

perhaps recognise again the differentiation of Symbolism from English Victorian poetry.
 397

Eliot endorses this in 1958 (Valéry 'defends the privacy, even the anonymity of the poet, and

the independence of the poem when it has been written and dismissed by the poet' (xvii)), so

if contradiction there is, it is not to be resolved chronologically. We must distinguish

therefore between two kinds of personality. Valéry does not write poems which reveal

anything about him as empirical subject, but writes poetry to - and regards poetry as being

written in order to - create forms which, in the final analysis, gratify the subject, and to

contemplate the process of writing. The concept of impersonality which Eliot advances in his

introduction to Le Serpent is not incompatible therefore with his critique of Valéry's self-

consciousness.

This leads us to a nice consideration in Eliot's 'Tradition', namely the relationship of

his concept of tradition in Part I to his catalyst analogy in Part II. The catalyst analogy

presents the poet as the active-passive agent of tradition which Eliot's concept of tradition

demands: he receives his material from the outside, but must make something new with it,

without himself being active as a subject. However, with Valéry, we witness an upping of the

stakes, and the poet can become conscious as a self of his impersonal activity. This may seem

a long way from Eliot's original statements, but it is the logical conclusion to which those

statements point. Valéry's self-consciousness would represent the remastering of the alterity

of the other by the subject. What this shows is that the catalyst analogy - and the doctrine of

impersonality in poetic creation as it is formulated in 'Tradition' and 'A Brief Introduction'

and by Valéry - is not sufficient to be traditional and authentically impersonal. It is only when

combined with an authentic relationship to tradition that the passivity described by the

catalyst analogy works. This brings us back again to the mimetès, and to Eliot's critique of

formalism; to the fact that purely passive creation, like that of the formalist and the
 398

depersonalised poet in the catalyst analogy, can be recuperated dialectically by the

aesthetic. 109

But in the introduction to Le Serpent, Valéry's impersonality is also described as part

of an original traditionality, and is related to the very concept of surrender which links the

catalyst image to tradition in 'Tradition':

Like all of Valéry's poetry, it is impersonal in the sense that personal […] experience

is extended and completed in something impersonal - not in the sense of something

divorced from personal experience and passion. No good poetry is the latter; indeed,

the virtue […] of Lucretius is the passionate act by which he annihilates himself in a

system and unites himself with it, gaining something greater than himself. Such a

surrender requires great concentration. But to those who like to preserve themselves

in their limited "personalities," and to have the emotions and notions of those

personalities flattered by constant repetition rather than extended and transformed by

the poet's superior organisation, neither Lucretius nor Valéry, nor any other excellent

poet, can ever really be acceptable and comprehensible (14).

109The argument by Mowbray Allan, and Allen Austin (T. S. Eliot: The Literary and Social Criticism.

Bloomington IN and London: Indiana UP, 1971. 4-11), that Eliot's concept of impersonality is really

personal, and only interposes an impersonal medium between the poet and the poem, are based on the

catalyst analogy and on the 'objective correlative'. Eliot's critique of Valéry is therefore implicitly also a

critique of those formulations of his concept of impersonality which are not sufficiently related to his

concept of tradition, so as to prevent them from being reappropriated (as they are by the above authors)

by a concept of creation based on personality. The importance of terms like 'objective correlative' to

students of Eliot's criticism, as well as the embarrassment he felt toward them and their high-profile (cf.

Use of Poetry Pref. (1964)), might be explained by the fact that such terms make it possible to

understand his concept of impersonality in personalist terms.

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The argument that poetry must be impersonal, but not divorced from personal experience, is

an aspect of Eliot's criticism which is called contradictory. But Eliot is arguing here against

the kind of passivity which is recuperable by the aesthetic. The poet is not just impersonal

here in the sense of being detached from his emotions, but as surrendering to something

outside of him. But the condition of authenticity of this surrender is that the poet create

something new which was only latent in the other. That is why the poem is also personal,

although in a sense which must be considered sous rature. It is no coincidence therefore if

Eliot discusses the 'constant repetition' which attends the cultivation of personality, and

which reaches its climax in the possession which constitutes absolutely passive creation. This

is opposed to the kind of impersonal surrender in which the other is 'extended and

transformed'.

This beautiful passage might have been introduced earlier as exemplifying Eliot's

concept of tradition, but has been kept in reserve in order to contrast it with Eliot's critique of

Valéry as the epitome of self-consciousness. The chronological approach is not sufficient to

unravel this knot because, as we saw, Eliot already critiques Valéry for holding an aesthetic

position in 'Dante' (1920). The only way to understand this contradiction is with reference to

Valéry's ambiguous position as representing the end of the nineteenth century, and as

belonging while at the same time not belonging to the movement of self-consciousness. We

find this supported by a decidedly uncanny anticipation in 1924 of the end of 'Leçon':

Undoubtedly, Valéry does not represent the most "advanced" experimentation of

French verse: that experimentation will be reintegrated into the tradition by a later

generation: what Valéry represents, and for which he is honoured and admired by

even the youngest in France, is the reintegration of the symbolist movement into the

great tradition ('A Brief Introduction' 7-8).

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The tradition Eliot has in mind is the classical tradition, and what Valéry 'represents', in 1924,

is the same thing that he represents when Eliot portrays him as the epitome of self-

consciousness: the possibility of demarcation from and reintegration of the aesthetic. The

only difference is that in 1924 there are two experimentations, Valéry's, and one more

advanced than Valéry's, which he is reintegrating into tradition. In 1947, Valéry represents

the most advanced experiment, but is not able to reintegrate it into tradition. But in both

cases, it falls to a future generation of poets (i.e. Eliot) to accomplish this task.

Valéry therefore represents, in all his ambiguity, the cloture of the aesthetic. He takes

the aesthetic as far as it can go, and at the same time is intimate with and enabling of the

tradition which is opposed to it. I would like to put forward for consideration on the strength

of this the proposition that Eliot entertains toward Valéry a similar relationship as that of

Heidegger to Nietzsche. Both Valéry and Nietzsche share a similar view of art (cf. above Ch.

3 § 3), and Heidegger and Eliot a similar critique of aesthetics. Heidegger's confrontation

with Nietzsche was based on an endorsement of Nietzsche's break with Wagner, and Valéry's

critique of inspiration operated a kind of reversal in his position which was similar to the

reversal which attended Nietzsche's break. In Eliot's critique of Valéry, we find him directing

at Valéry the critique which Valéry directed at himself as part of his critique of inspiration.

Valéry's refusal of inspiration was also a refusal of the ideal of pure poetry for which Eliot

criticises him.

It is no surprise, then, to find Eliot endorsing Valéry's critique of inspiration: Valéry's

critique of inspiration 'is corrective of that romantic attitude which, in employing the word

"inspiration," inclines consciously or unconsciously to regard the poet's role, in the

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composition of the poem, as mediumistic and irresponsible' (CWV VII, xii; my emphasis). 110

Eliot finds in Valéry the very critique which underlies his critique of the self-consciousness

of formalism. Valéry's mediumistic poet is Eliot's catalyst without tradition. To this, Eliot

(and Valéry) oppose 'the subsequent process of deliberate, conscious, arduous labour'. 111

That opposition is a frequent one in Eliot's writing, and is found in his assertion that criticism

is beneficial to creation. 112 Criticism is what controls, in the first instance, the poet's self-

indulgence. But it also means that the other to which the poet submits must be criticised, and

therefore controls the even stronger dialectical self-indulgence of passive inspiration. The

description of inspiration as irresponsible designates the moral as well as the aesthetic

irresponsibility which attends this passivity. 113

110Eliot is also suspicious of 'that assimilation of Poetry to Music which was a symbolist tenet' (xiv),

and which was underpinned by the theory of inspiration: 'Music itself may be conceived as striving

towards an unattainable timelessness; and if the other arts may be thought of as yearning for duration,

so Music may be thought of as yearning for the stillness of painting and sculpture.' The arts for which,

Eliot argues, music yearns, are both representational, as well as representing a kind of limitation

(stillness as opposed to extension in time). These are also the characteristics by virtue of which Valéry

justifies the superiority of poetry over music.

111Cf. a similar use of 'labour' in 'Dryden the Critic' 725.

112Cf. 'Johnson' 190, 'Apology for the Countess of Pembroke' 29. Use of Poetry. 29-44, 'Dryden the

Critic' 724, 'Function of Criticism' 30, Sacred Wood Intro., xiv, 'The Perfect Critic' 16, and 'Tradition'

13.

113Karfik's critique of Heidegger focused on just such an irresponsible depersonalistion. Heidegger, as

we saw above (Ch. 1, Exrg.), founds his opposition to the aesthetic on the pre-Socratic age, which, he

argued, had no corresponding criticism for its art (Nietzsche Ch. 13, 80). We might detect in that

gesture the foundations of Heidegger's irresponsibility (cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Vérité Sublime' 110-111).

It is perhaps against just such an irresponsibility that Eliot denies the possibility of a golden age of art

without criticism: Use of Poetry Intro., 10, 12 and 20, and 'Experiment' 215.
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Valéry specifically uses intelligence to limit inspiration, and we find this

acknowledged, curiously, in a remark of Eliot's on his personality: 'Of some great men, one's

prevailing impression may be of goodness, or of inspiration, or of wisdom. I think the

prevailing impression one received of Valéry was of intelligence' ('Leçon'; my emphasis). 114

However, in conformity with the simultaneous gesture of praise and critique which we have

been discussing, Eliot limits the credit which he gives to Valéry's valorisation of intelligence.

His attitude to Valéry's intelligence, although critical, is broadly similar to William Kluback's

(see above, Ch. 3, § 3 n): his mind is 'a very adult mind playing with ideas because it was too

sceptical to hold convictions' ('From Poe to Valéry' 40). 115 Valéry's intelligence would on this

score be indistinguishable from poetic creation, according to a purely formalist conception:

without the encumbrance of conviction, the mind would be free to play with the infinite

possibilities of pure form. This, however, only corresponds to one part of Valéry's concept of

intelligence. The other part, which together makes Valéry's concept of intelligence take

Kant's concept of aesthetic ideas to a point of self-contradiction, interrupts inspiration, and

the possibility of the poem's Aufhebung into pure form. And yet, we must do justice to the

insight which accompanies Eliot's blindness. Valéry's concept of intelligence resulted - in

'Concerning Adonis' - in an agon of creation. Although Eliot on one hand does not

acknowledge the fruitful paradox in Valéry's concept of intelligence, he does notice the agon

of creation to which that paradox leads:

His was, I think, a profoundly destructive mind, even nihilistic. This cannot, one way

or another, alter our opinion of the poetry […]. But it should, I think, increase our

admiration for the man who wrote the poetry. For the agony of creation, for a mind

like Valéry's, must be very great. When the mind continually mocks and dissuades,

114Cf. Eliot's discussion of Aristotle's intelligence ('The Perfect Critic' 10-11).

115Cf. also CWV VII, xxii.

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and urges that creativity is in vain, then the slow genesis of a poem […] [is] only

possible by a desperate heroism which is a great triumph of character ('Leçon').

His description of Valéry's agony is an acute description of Valéry's own description of the

desperate hero Adonis. Eliot's qualifier ('this cannot …', but it should …') is perhaps alive to

the fact that Valéry's agony of creation prevent his concept of the intelligence from being

mere nihilistic play. 116

Eliot writes that 'Valéry was much too sceptical to believe even in art [for art's sake].

It is significant, the number of times he describes something he has written as an ébauche - a

rough draft. He had ceased to believe in ends, and was only interested in processes' ('From

Poe to Valéry' 39-40). Eliot sees Valéry's trait as an overdeveloped self-consciousness,

disproportionate attention to the self rather than to the object. But he also notices that this

interest in the process prevents Valéry from believing in art for art's sake, in the aesthetic in

other words. That the poem is never finished, only abandoned as Valéry says, suggests that it

cannot arrive at the transcendence of pure form in which the aesthetic is accomplished. If the

116Eliot's refusal to credit Valéry's concept of intelligence also limits the credit he gives to Valéry's

critique of inspiration. The '"cool scientist"' whom Valéry opposes in 'On Literary Technique' (1889)

(CWV VII, App., 314-323 [Bilingual ed.]) to the inspired dreamer, 'is an alternative, rather than the

antithesis to the "dishevelled madman": a different mask for the same actor' (xix). As he does in 'From

Poe to Valéry', Eliot sees Valéry's intelligence not as opposed to formalist inspiration, but as another

aspect of it, and because of this does not think that Valéry's critique of inspiration (of the dishevelled

madman) is radical enough. The reference to masks is suggestive of Nietzsche, and the opposition

which Eliot is discussing is analogous to the opposition between Dyonisian and Apollinian. Eliot is

unable to credit Valéry's privileging of intelligence over inspiration, which is comparable to the

privilege which in Nietzsche accompanies his break with Wagner: Eliot's refusal to acknowledge this
 404

poet continually modifies the poem and changes the words, it can never be aufgehoben into

the parnassian ideal, but continues to exist in the particular changes made to it. 117

Eliot describes this escape from the aesthetic as falling into another aesthetic: the

aesthetic of the self. There is certainly support for such a view in Valéry's text. Dance and

pure verse 'exist to make me more present to myself, more entirely given up to myself' ('A

Poet's Notebook' 176), and Valéry writes that 'There is a special quality, a kind of individual

energy proper to the poet. It appears in him and reveals him to himself at certain infinitely

precious moments' ('Remarks on Poetry' 213). This corresponds to the speculative tendency

which is present in Valéry's poetics: poetry is self-revelation, absolute knowledge. Moreover,

these moments are described in similar terms to the moments of felicity whose transience is

remedied by drugs for Baudelaire: 'But these are only moments, and this higher energy […]

exists and can act only in brief and fortuitous manifestations' ('Remarks on Poetry' 213). The

self-consciousness Eliot criticises in Valéry could be seen as participating in the speculative

movement we have just remarked on: by endlessly rewriting his poems, the poet turns his

attention solely on himself and his creative processes. This train of thought would seem to

lead Valéry to contradict Eliot's theory of impersonality with a distinctly Nietzschean remark:

'in my opinion it is more useful to speak of what one has experienced than to pretend to a

knowledge that is entirely impersonal, an observation with no observer. In fact there is no

theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography' ('Poetry and

break in Valéry amounts to an inability to acknowledge Valéry's break with inspiration and formalism,

and his privileging of poetry over music.

117The idea that endless reworking prevents the accomplishment of the dialectic is hinted at in one of

Valéry's characteristic mockeries of philosophy: 'Here are the Danaïdes, Ixions, and Sisyphuses,

eternally laboring to fill bottomless casks and to push back the falling rock, that is, to redefine the same

dozen words whose combinations form the treasure of Speculative Knowledge' ('Poetry and Abstract

Thought' 54; my emphasis).

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Abstract Thought' 58). 118 Eliot would accordingly condemn Valéry's endless revision as the

epitome of self-conscious individualism. 119

But close attention to the terms of Valéry's privileging of process over result, a page

after his remark that poetry makes him more present to himself, suggests something different:

'A work is never necessarily finished, for he who has made it is never complete, and the

power and agility he has drawn from it confer on him just the power to improve it, and so on

…. He draws from it what is needed to efface and remake it' ('A Poet's Notebook' 176). This

is not the observation of a subjectivity insulated from the world external to it, but of one

which is entirely constituted by the changing influences on it. This is made quite explicit in

another remark on Valéry's desire to keep changing his work:

118Nietzsche makes an almost identical point in Beyond Good and Evil Pt. I, § 6, 13. Cf. also 'But other

lines, which are the whole poetry of the work, sing, and comprise all that the poet draws from his

deepest being' ('On Speaking Verse' 166). At the same time, however, Valéry denies that the poet is the

expression of authorial intention. We find here a paradox similar to the one pointed out in Eliot: poetry

has its origins in the personal, but never results in it. Writing always cuts itself off from its author. Cf.

'Concerning Le Cimetière Marin' 152, 'Commentaries on Charmes' 155-157', 'The Necessity of Poetry'

228, 'Spiritual Canticles' (1944) 288-289. CWV VII, 279-294, and 'Variations on the Eclogues' 300 and

304. There need be no paradox in this however. It is an empirical fact that the poet must draw on his

own personality for the materials of his poem, but this does not imply that what he writes will retain a

metaphysical link to that personality, nor that that personality is unified in a metaphysical way. Both

Valéry and Eliot argue quite the opposite.

119Eliot cites this phrase in order to then go on to make this very point: 'we read [Valéry's essays] for

their own sake, for the delight in following the subtleties of thought[,] which moves like a trained

dancer' (CWV VII, xxii). However, he also cites it in 'Scylla and Charybdis' to support the fact that his

own ideas in that lecture spring from his experience as a poet (17). Valéry's remark can be interpreted

both as navel gazing and as the basis for a criticism which is dichterisch rather than aesthetic.
 406

I cannot go back over anything I have written without thinking that I should now

make something different of it, if some outside intervention or some circumstance

had not broken the enchantment of never finishing with it. I enjoy work only as work

[je n'aime que le travail du travail]: beginnings bore me, and I suspect everything that

comes at the first attempt of being capable of improvement. Spontaneity, even when

excellent or seductive, has never seemed to me sufficiently mine. […] The notion of

myself is no simpler than that of Author: a further degree of consciousness opposes a

new Self to a new Other ('Concerning Le Cimetière Marin' 144).

Only outside interventions prevent Valéry from 'never finishing with it', but that does not

mean that it is only internal interventions which enable that process. Each change made to the

work alters the self: it finds a new self, and divides the self, confronting a new self to a new

other. 120 The self of Valéry's poetics is (de)constituted by the act of writing, and is not the

transcendental subject of aesthetics. The poet's revelation to himself is an endless process

which cannot be thought in dialectical terms.

In fact, it is in the division of this subject that Valéry rebels against the aesthetic. 121

In those moments in which the poet is revealed to himself, which we cited from 'Remarks on

Poetry':

The ideas or forms it produces within ourselves are very far from having the same

value in the eyes of others.

120Cf. 'Concerning Adonis' 20 and 'Poetry and Abstract Thought' 58-59.

121Valéry excuses himself from following the negative prescriptions on poetry with which he prefaced

the Anthologie des Poètes de la N.R.F. (1936) with some more positive recommendations, because

these latter could only be personal to him: 'Nothing is more difficult than not being oneself, or than

being oneself only so far and no farther' ('Problems of Poetry' 99).

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These infinitely precious moments, these instants that lend a kind of

universal dignity to the relations […] they provoke, are no less fruitful in illusory or

incommunicable values. What is of value to us alone has no value [Valéry's

emphasis]. This is the law of literature. These sublime states are only "absences" in

which natural marvels are met with that are only found there ('Remarks on Poetry'

213-214).

This paragraph introduces one of Valéry's most sustained critiques of inspiration, 122 and ends

with the remark quoted in Chapter 3 (§ 3) ('But inspiration is meant for the reader …').

Derrida in 'Qual Quelle' shows that Valéry's writing on the source examines the possibility of

self-knowledge, of the source of knowledge being able to return on itself, and know itself. In

Chapter 3 we argued that the ideal of pure form was achieved in Valéry's poetics by a

dialectic process, in which content and meaning were sublated into pure form. Inspiration

participated in this speculative gesture, allowing the poet to reach the divine sphere,

uncontaminated by the worldly one. Here, Valéry presents the poet's self-revelation as a form

of inspiration, which is 'impure', and must be submitted to the poet's revision. To be pure, in

the sense of 'pure form', the poem must be impure, because the product of raw inspiration.

Valéry is quite explicit in his demonstration of the paradox of pure poetry. Intelligence

interrupts the dialectic of self-knowledge here just as it did the ideal of pure form. And

intelligence manifests itself precisely in revision: inspiration produces the first draft,

intelligence continually refines it. The endless revision of the poem undoes both the aesthetic

of pure form and the aesthetic of subjectivity. In so doing, it places Valéry in unequivocal

122'If one cared to develop rigorously the doctrine of pure inspiration […] [o]ne would necessarily find

[…] a that a poet who limits himself to transmitting what he receives […] has no need to understand

what he writes under this mysterious dictation. [¶] He has no effect on the poem of which he is not the

source. He can be utterly alien to what flows through him' (214).

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agreement with Eliot, in saying that 'what is of value to us alone has no value.' The process of

revision is what makes the work of value to everyone.

Once again, Eliot's critique of Valéry's self-consciousness has been anticipated by

Valéry himself. And once again, Eliot is at the same time obliquely aware of that

anticipation. After having warned against the excesses of Valéry's view of the poem as a draft

(CWV VII xii-xiii), Eliot writes that Valéry 'mean[s] that a poem is "finished," or that I will

never touch it again, when I am sure that I have exhausted my own resources, that the poem is

as good as I can make that poem' (xiii). The poem's status as draft is an acknowledgement of

the poem's finitude, the fact that it will never be perfect. And if we realise that the perfection

of a poem is associated with its dialectical Aufhebung into pure form, we can see that Eliot's

concept of the poem's finitude is close to Valéry's. For both, the draft status of the poem

prevents it from achieving a kind of transcendence.

Eliot writes that 'the poet, if anybody, is one engaged in perpetual [my emphasis]

pursuit of the right word. […] [A]s to the right word, I am not convinced it is anything but a

mirage' ('Scylla and Charybdis' 6). The draft status of the poem derives from the inability to

find the right word, which would enable the poet to stop rewriting it. Eliot is quite practical in

his reasons for saying that the right word is a mirage: the poetic value of a word depends on

'the literal meaning of the word, the associations of the word, and the sound of the word', and

it is as a matter of practice impossible to find a word which reconciles the three (Eliot

exemplifies this (7-8) with reference to 'The Dry Salvages'). This apparently anodine remark

has an important bearing on our discussion. It is the refusal to conceive of poetry as pure

(form or content, music and literal meaning) which ensures its draft status. In other words,

Eliot himself depends on Valéry's idea of the ébauche in order to think poetry outside

aesthetics. And this involves a form of submission. The poet always inherits the language he

uses from the other (tradition and community). The only way in which he might transcend the
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impurities which stand in the way of the finished poem would be to refuse the arbitrary of the

language he inherits, and to create a fiction of a language which was purified of them (cf.

Barthes 123 and Mallarmé (discussed above Ch. 3 § 1) as well as Valéry). By accepting the

finitude of the poem, Eliot submits himself to language, and by submitting himself to

language submits to the other. 124

From this results a paradoxical fact. By attending to the creative process in a certain

manner, Eliot (and Valéry) depersonalise poetic creation in a radical sense. Indeed, Eliot's

catalyst image in 'Tradition' exemplifies this very process. Interestingly, we find the use of an

analogous image by Valéry criticised: 'Sometimes, I think, Valéry allowed himself to get

carried away too far by his metaphors of the clinic and the laboratory' (xxi). Rather than

respond with a simple tu quoque, we can see that Eliot is directing criticism at a possibility

which was latent in his own catalyst metaphor. At the same time the crux against which the

aesthetic always founders is that of the active-passive creation which can only be grasped by

the kind of attention to the creative process constituted by Valéry (and Eliot)'s notion of the

poem as draft.

Eliot's simultaneous praise and critique of Valéry, and the anticipation in Valéry of

Eliot's critique of him are combined in Eliot's presentation of formalism as a dead-end. Eliot

writes of the French Symbolists' attitude toward poetry that '[i]t is all the more worthy of

examination if, as I incline to believe, this attitude to poetry represents a phase which has

come to an end with the death of Valéry. For our study of it should help towards the

understanding of whatever it may be that our generation and the next will find to take its

123Cf. L'empire des signes. Paris: Flammarion, Geneva: Skira, 1970/ Empire of Signs. Trans. Richard

Howard. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.

124'So I had in the end to put "waning dusk" [in Little Gidding II, 38]. It was not what I had wanted: but

it was, I believe, the best the English language could do for me' ('Scylla and Charybdis' 8).
 410

place' ('From Poe to Valéry' 29). 125 The formalist aesthetic has 'come to an end' with Valéry,

and it is starting from this end-point that Eliot's generation will find its own way of

understanding poetry. Eliot writes that 'poetry is only poetry so long as it preserves some

"impurity" in this sense: that is to say, so long as the subject matter is valued for its own sake'

(39). This we already find recognised in Valéry's denial of inspiration and of the self-

revelation which accompanies it. Moreover, the faculty which motivates this denial is

intelligence; it is intelligence which ensures the impurity of pure poetry. Valéry, like Eliot,

sees that the end of formalism must result in the revaluation of the subject matter; Eliot, like

Valéry, sees that poetry must progress from formalism by reinventing its intelligence.

125Cf. also 'Poe's Philosophy of Composition is a mise au point of the question which gives it capital

importance in relation to this process which ends in Valéry [my emphasis]' ('From Poe to Valéry' 41).

One might also consider Eliot's description of the modern criticism which, he says in that lecture,

originates in Coleridge, as a kind of shooting-star, which is brightest before its extinction: 'These last

thirty years [i.e. 1920s-1950s] have been, I think, a brilliant period in literary criticism in both Britain

and America. It may come to seem, in retrospect, too brilliant. Who knows?' ('Frontiers' 118). Compare

Eliot's comment on Valéry's concept of pure poetry: 'it illuminates like the flash of an empty cigarette

lighter in the dark: if there is no fuel in the lighter, the momentary flash leaves a sense of darkness more

impenetrable than before' (xv) and the remark that we read Valéry 'for the pleasure of sudden

illuminations even when they turn out to be feux follets' ['will o' the wisps'] (xxii). Compare also the

description of logical positivism as exploring blind alleys in an interesting manner (Pieper,

Leisure Intro., 12). Derrida describes structuralist formalism as characterised by an absence of force

and the finitude (in the sense here of 'no longer changing', 'absolutely comprehended by formal

analysis', as opposed to the opposite finitude, discussed above, which describes 'the contingent which

can never be aufgehoben into the infinite') which allows its objects to be totally comprehended by

formal analysis ('Force et Signification' 13/5). The structuralism discussed in this essay takes the body

of writing it analyses as finished, and sees itself as part of and responding to the catastrophe of this end.
 411

The identity of Eliot and Valéry's views on this point is underlined by the terms in

which Eliot envisages the accomplishment of the formalist aesthetic:

And, as for the future: it is a tenable hypothesis that this advance of self-

consciousness, the extreme awareness of and concern for language which we find in

Valéry, is something which must ultimately break down, owing to an increasing

strain against which the human mind and nerves will rebel; just as it may be

maintained, the indefinite elaboration of scientific discovery and invention, and of

political and social machinery, may reach a point at which there will be an irresistible

revulsion of humanity and a readiness to accept the most primitive hardships rather

than carry any longer the burden of modern civilization. Upon that I have no fixed

opinion: I leave it to your consideration (42).

The risks presented by the development of self-consciousness do not threaten society (as do

the excesses of personality), but the poet. And the threat is constituted by the poet's being

unable to tolerate the extremes of formalism. This extreme is one in which the poet enjoys

and creates immediate access to the superhuman sphere; Eliot's remark therefore follows not

only Valéry's, but the whole strand of writing from the Phaedrus through Nietzsche which

regards inspiration as deinon or unheimlich. And the effect of this contact with the

superhuman on the poet is envisaged by Eliot in similar terms to those in which Valéry

envisages the plight of Adonis: he suffers (his nerves will rebel) and his mind, which

inspiration would bypass, is challenged to reassert itself (the human mind will rebel).

Furthermore, Eliot compares this situation to the strains imposed by technological

modernisation, which Valéry criticises in similar terms. 126 The critique which Eliot addresses

to Valéry has already been addressed to him by Valéry himself. In identifying Valéry's

126Cf. above Chapter 3 § 3 n.

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aesthetic as a dead end, he simultaneously confirms Valéry's own analysis, and responds to

his call to go beyond it.

Eliot regards the poetics accomplished by Valéry as both necessary (no aesthetic at

the time was as interesting) and fruitful. He prefaces his praise of Valéry by writing: 'We

should have to have an aesthetic which somehow comprehended and transcended that of Poe

and Valéry. 127 This question does not greatly exercise my mind, since I think that the poet's

theories should arise out of his practice rather than his practice out of his theories' (41-42; cf.

also 33). 128 What we have shown is that the attempt to transcend the aesthetic of Valéry and

Poe, which correspond together to the Kantian aesthetic transformed by Romanticism and

French Symbolism, is at work in the most fruitful of Eliot's critical writing. Specifically, Eliot

attempts to delimit a Romantic aesthetic based on possession, gratification of the

metaphysical subject, dialectical self-consciousness, with an appeal to the virtues of

representative accuracy and sobriety. In attempting to think poetry outside aesthetics, Eliot is

127Specifically, '[t]o insist on the all-importance of subject matter, to insist that the poet should be

spontaneous and irreflective, that he should depend upon inspiration and neglect technique, would be a

lapse from what is in any case a highly civilized attitude to a barbarous one' (41). Eliot once again

associates inspiration with barbarism. Including Valéry's poetics in his own project brings with it the

lesson that he cannot simply return to naïve realism or to irresponsible inspiration.

128Eliot describes Valéry as occupying essentially the same intermediate position between poetic

criticism and aesthetic criticism as Coleridge: CWV VII, xx, Chiari, Symbolisme Intro., vii and 'From

Poe to Valéry' 39. However, what Eliot writes about Valéry on this subject at one point might apply to

himself: 'one feels that Valéry's theory and practice are faithful to each other: how far his practice was

the application of the theory, and how far his theory is simply a correct account of his practice, is an

unanswerable question. It is this unity which gives his essays a perennial fascination' ('Introduction'

CWV xxi).
 413

confronted with the question of inspiration and of the subject. It is Eliot's confrontation with

Valéry that enables him to create a new poetics which brings aesthetics inside tradition.

5. Dante

That Dante was exemplary of the sort of poetry valued by Eliot's criticism is not

controversial, 129 and nor is the claim that he was regarded by Eliot as exemplifying the sort

of poetry he was trying to write. 130 Furthermore, it would have been possible, up to a point,

to base a discussion of Eliot's concepts of tradition, 131 impersonality, 132 and community and

European regionalism133 solely on the three essays which Eliot published and collected on

129Cf. 'the last canto of the Paradiso […] is to my thinking the highest point that poetry has ever

reached or ever can reach' ('Dante' (1929) 251. Selected Essays. Pt. IV, 237-277). Dante also epitomises

the unification of intellect with the senses, which Eliot calls metaphysical poetry: 'the characteristic of

the type of poetry I am trying to define is that it elevates sense for a moment to regions ordinarily

attainable only by abstract thought, or on the other hand clothes the abstract, for a moment, with the

painful delight of flesh' ('Clark Lecture # 1' 55). Eliot goes on: 'Dante is the great exemplar not only for

the type which forms the theme of these lectures, but of every type' (56).

130'I still, after forty years, regard his poetry as the most persistent and deepest influence upon my own

verse' ('What Dante Means to Me' (1950) 125. To Criticize the Critic. 125-135). Cf. also 'To Criticize'

23 and 'Dante' (1929) 268.

131Cf. 'Dante' (1929) 253, 262 and 274 and 'What Dante Means to Me' 128-129 and 132-133.

132Cf. 'Dante' (1929) 263-264 and 272-273.

133Dante exemplifies Eliot's concept of Regional Europe: 'Dante, none the less an Italian and a patriot,

is first a European' ('Dante' (1929) 239). Dante's speech exemplifies Eliot's ideal of a culture which is

both local and particular, and universal in its relations to other cultures: 'Some of the character of this

universal language [medieval Latin] seems to me to inhere in Dante's Florentine speech; and the

localization ("Florentine" speech) seems if anything to emphasize the universality, because it cuts

across the modern division of nationality' (239). Eliot argues that 'in Dante's time Europe, with all its
 414

Dante (in 1920, 1929, and 1950). Alternatively, this concluding discussion of Dante might

provide the icing on the cake for the preceding discussion, which would have demonstrated

that what I will argue about Eliot in relation to Dante now "has also been proved to be true of

everyone else"; Dante is (as in Mao's China) like everyone else, only more so. But this would

be to erase the specificity of Dante for Eliot, and to attenuate his exemplarity. I will still

argue however that Eliot develops the essentials of his critical thought in relation to Dante,

and that Dante provides the model for the future poetry with which Eliot wanted (particularly

in 'Leçon' and 'From Poe to Valéry') to relay the poetry exemplified by Valéry. At the same

time, I will argue that Eliot's concept of tradition cannot countenance the possibility of a

simple return to Dante. 134 Any return to Dante must be a contemporary and original

dissensions and dirtiness, was mentally more united than we can now conceive. It is not particularly the

treaty of Versailles that has separated nation from nation; nationalism was born long before; and the

process of disintegration which for our generation culminates in that treaty began soon after Dante's

time' (240). Eliot links the Reformation (which, he argues in 'Clark Lecture # 2', brought the age of

Dante to an end) to nationalism, and specifically the nationalism which 'culminates' in the treaty of

Versailles. That treaty was characterised (in the eyes of its critics) by the artificial grouping of regions

into nation states which were unified only by their antagonism to other nation states (cf. François Fejtö.

Requiem pour un Empire défunt: Histoire de la déstruction de l'Autriche-Hongrie. Paris: Seuil, 1989).

And it is this concept of the nation state on which many of the treaty's detractors blame the second

world war. It is in relation to Dante that Eliot articulates most clearly the concept of the modern nation

state as an apotheosis of individualism. To this he opposes a speech which 'cuts across the modern

divisions of nationality' because it is at once more local and more universal. And just as Dante's

language is more universal, the Comedia's poetic structure is analogous to the Europe he represents: 'we

cannot extract the full significance of the part without knowing the whole' (244; cf. also 'Dante' (1920)

170). Cf. also 'What Dante Means to Me' 134-135, and 'What is a Classic?' 60. Virgil enjoys a similar

European universality ('What is a Classic?' 61-63).

134Eliot repeatedly argues that we cannot hope to return to the simpler society of the past, but must

revive the values of that society within the complexity of our own (cf. Christian Society Pt. II, 60). Eliot
 415

repetition of Dante ('en diapheron heauto'). This is the lesson of Eliot's claim that the new

poetics must comprehend the aesthetic of Valéry: if Dante is to be reached, he must be

reached from an aesthetic which includes Valéry('s). This corresponds in part to the implicit

awareness on Eliot's part that the delimitation of the nineteenth-century aesthetic was brought

about by Valéry. What I am going to argue is that it is Valéry, and the questions which are

formulated for Eliot through him and through Coleridge, which make Eliot's relationship to

Dante possible. The Dante whom Eliot holds up as an exemplar could not have been

understood by Eliot in the way he did without the concept of mimesis and inspiration which

reached him through Coleridge and Valéry.

The best known statement of Eliot's argument about the relationship of literature with

the extra-literary is made in connection with Dante:

In reading Dante you must enter the world of thirteenth-century Catholicism[,] which

is not the world of modern Catholicism, as his world of physics is not the world of

modern physics. You are not called upon to believe what Dante believed, for your

belief will not give you a groat's worth more of understanding and appreciation; but

you are called upon more and more to understand it. If you can read poetry as poetry,

you will 'believe' in Dante's theology exactly as you believe in the physical reality of

his journey; that is, you suspend both belief and disbelief. 135

argues that such a regress would involve a return to an age in which religion and culture were identified,

and that 'Totalitarianism appeals to th[is] desire to return to the womb' (Notes Ch. 4, 68). Cf. also

Notes Ch. 4, 71-72, 'Unity of European Culture # 2' 118 and Christian Society Pt. II, 60.

135'Dante' (1929) 257-258 A similar point is made in 'Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca' (1927).

Selected Essays. Pt. III, 126-140/ Elizabethan Essays. 33-54.

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The assent to Dante's Catholicism is presented as analogous to belief in the reality of what his

poem represents, and both enjoy the same latitude. That latitude is similar to that enjoyed by

the imagination in Coleridge in relation to belief in the events represented by a play or

experienced in a dream: we do not judge either way. 136 Eliot's opposition to didacticism is

part of a wider opposition to an over-rigid realism. 137 Eliot also makes the opposite claim,

that accurate description is a literary virtue. 138 Eliot's position on mimesis is, in fact, archi-

136Cf. Coleridge. '1818-19 Lectures on Shakespeare # 1' [Coleridge's notes BM MS Egerton;

Coleridge's notes as edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge]. Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature. Collected

Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. General Ed. Kathleen Coburn. 16 vols. and index [partially

completed]. London: Routledge, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967-. V (1987). Ed. R. A. Foakes. ii, 266.

137Eliot, like Valéry, contrasts the play with the cinema's ability to 'give[] an illusion not of the stage

but of life itself', and writes: 'you see that it is reasonable that the stage should not attempt to compete

with the film in illusion of scenery, and surprising realism of event. It should turn to the voice, to the

movement which is meant to be seen from several angles, and to the things which can be done by the

actor himself and which cannot be done by his pictures' ('The Need for Poetic Drama' 994. The

Listener 16 (25 November 1936). 994-995). He criticises an over-rigid attempt to represent reality

realistically on stage when he writes that '[t[he great vice of English drama from Kyd to Galsworthy has

been that its aim of realism has been unlimited' ('Four Elizabethan Dramatists' (1924) 111. Selected

Essays. Pt. III, 109-117/ Elizabethan Essays. 7-20).

138Eliot praises Dante by comparison with Tennyson for his story-telling ability: 'The very greatest

poets set before you real men talking, carry you on in real events moving' ('In Memoriam' (1936) 331.

Selected Essays. Pt. V, 328-338; cf. also 'Dante' (1929) 250). In 'A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry', the

character E, whose views throughout the dialogue echo Eliot's (although other protagonists also put

forward views advanced elsewhere by Eliot, so that the dialogue form works more as a didactic

explanation of one argument than as an opposition of conflicting arguments), agrees with D's remark

that '[w]hen the age has set religious beliefs and practice, then the drama can and should tend towards

realism, I say towards, I do not say arrive at. The more definite the religious and ethical principles, the

more freely the drama can move towards what is now called photography' ('A Dialogue on Dramatic
 417

Poetry' (1928) 49. Selected Essays. Pt. II, 43-58). Cf. also 'The Possibility of a Poetic Drama' (1920)

67. The Sacred Wood. 60-70. Herbert Lindenberger classifies Eliot as a mimetic Anglo-Saxon literary

critic on the strength of Eliot's critique of Milton and Swinburne for privileging sound over sense ('The

Mimetic Bias in Modern Anglo-American Criticism' 5-8. The Literary and Philosophical Debate.

Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach: 2 vols. Philadelphia: Benjamins,

1984 and 1991. I (1984), 1-26). Lindenberger argues that all English critics (with occasional exceptions

such as Oscar Wilde), from Chaucer to the moderns on whom his essay focuses, remain mimetic critics,

however much they attempt to emancipate literature from the requirements of representation. What

constitutes a non-mimetic critic for Lindenberger is vague however: Barthes, Derrida and the Russian

Formalists are non-mimetic because they 'set up' 'strict demarcations […] between the verbal realm and

whatever exists outside it' (17); Valéry is non-mimetic because of 'his ideal of a mind suspended in pure

consciousness'; 'deconstructionists', because of their 'radical scepticism about language's ability to

apprehend reality' (21). Lindenberger in other words sets up the very opposition between a pure

formalism and mimeticism which both Valéry and Derrida question. His vagueness on the subject of

non-mimetic criticism betrays the paradoxical nature of the position which he imputes to them; he can

only call the Anglo-American critics mimetic on the basis of a definition of a mimeticism which is so

generalised that the non-mimeticism which he opposes to it becomes unsustainable. Consequently, even

he does not endorse the position from which he exposes the mimetic bias he discusses, and states

(somewhat in the manner of a government official at a press briefing): 'I do not however advocate the

abolition of mimetic thinking in our response to literary texts' (22). He advocates, rather, a

reconciliation between Anglo-American mimeticism and French formalism. But this degree of self-

consciousness and carefulness (mimetic critics might 'stop trying to subject patently anti-mimetic types

of writing such as Surrealist texts […] to mimetically biased judgements' (22)) does not contribute

anything new to the aesthetic as we have defined it. For other discussions of the role of mimesis in

English criticism, cf. George Steiner. After Babel: Aspects of Language and translation. London:

Oxford UP, 1975. 255, and Marie-Madeleine Martinet. 'Indétermination, mimesis et expression dans

l'histoire de l'esthétique anglaise' (1981). Poétique(s): Domaine anglais. Lyon: Presses Universitaires

de Lyon, 1983. 341-354. Martinet focuses on those parts of English aesthetics in the eighteenth and
 418

conventional and archi-aesthetic when limited to these statements. It is also archi-

undogmatic. Realism is a virtue, but not one to be enforced in a strict way; and there will

always be works which will be able to justify their departure from accurate representation.

But our discussion of mimesis up till now has shown that all positions on mimesis are

assimilable to this one, by definition. The interesting thing in Eliot is what he does with the

latitude he grants to the work of art.

Eliot's position on the importance of the beliefs contained in or viewpoints advanced

by a poem in our artistic appreciation is also archi-conventional, up to a point. He argues that

criticism of literature in terms of literature 'should be completed by criticism from a definite

ethical and theological standpoint.'139 Furthermore, he accepts that the views advanced by

poetry have a bearing on our literary appreciation of those poems as poems, arguing that

although we need not accept the views, they must be tenable if they are not to harm

appreciation. This argument is cited as an example of Eliot's inconsistency, 140 but our thesis

has shown that Eliot's position is entirely consistent with the aesthetic position on poetry's

nineteenth century which opposed mimetic ideas of art in the name of concepts of indetermination

(under which she classes the sublime and Keats's negative capability).

139'Religion and Literature' (1935) 388. Selected Essays. Pt. VI, 388-402. The essay as a whole is an

important statement of that argument. Eliot makes a similar point in relation to contemporary literature

(Mansfield, Lawrence, Hardy and Joyce) in After Strange Gods 35-38 (cf. also Notes Ch. 2, 30).

140Cf. Austin, T. S. Eliot: The Literary and Social Criticism 44, and Hyman, 'T. S. Eliot and Tradition

in Criticism'. Hyman and Austin separate in a shallow manner Eliot's assertion of the independent value

of poetry from the broader argument in which they are made: 'This is a hint of another basic belief of

Eliot's […], the belief that art is fundamentally a closed system, and that criteria of belief or

correspondence to reality are irrelevant to it' (Hyman 124). Hyman then argues that such remarks are

contradicted by his assertion after his conversion (1927) of the importance of beliefs to poetry: by this,

writes Hyman, 'Eliot signalizes the absence of any dispassionate aesthetic concern whatsoever' (129).
 419

relation to reality and belief (poetry does not copy, but is still meaningfully related to reality;

poetry is not philosophy or religion, but must exist and be appreciated in relation to the truth

disclosed by them). On this score, orthodoxy of opinion (albeit flexible) is what makes

aesthetics possible, which is what explains why extreme individualism militates against

'accepted rules or opinions as to the limitations of the literary job' (After Strange Gods Ch. 2,

32): orthodoxy makes it possible for us to define the literary job. And that definition

conforms to the aesthetic. Our argument that Eliot's critique of individualism is also a critique

against aesthetics, must recognise that a strand of Eliot's thinking confirms the aesthetic, and

that an aesthetic Eliot could be extracted from the corpus of Eliot's writing without

injustice. 141

141One might base such a reading on the essays collected in Elizabethan Essays and part III of Selected

Essays. These display an aesthetic approach to belief, which argues (much as Eliot argued in connection

with Baudelaire) that the immorality of the plays is essentially connected to morality, while criticising

'conventional moralising' ('Thomas Middleton' (1927) 165. Selected Essays. 161-170/ Elizabethan

Essays. 87-100. For Lancelot Andrewes. London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928. 100-116). Without

demanding strict realism of description, they demand a relationship between language and reality: 'We

may conclude directly from these quotations that Massinger's feeling for language had outstripped his

feeling for things' ('Massinger' 209), or 'A "living" character is not necessarily "true to life"' (212). They

also value the expression of real emotion - 'slowly, the real human passions emerge from the mesh of

interest in which they begin' ('Middleton' 165) - while criticising insincere or hollow sentimentality and

poverty of intellect (cf. 'Massinger' 210-211). Underlying some of Eliot's judgements in these essays, it

must be admitted, are uncritical distinctions between authenticity and falseness (cf. 'the emotion of

Beatrice […] is as permanent and substantial as anything in human nature' (212-213)), which, like some

Romantic criticism, looks for a poetry of authenticity to higher truths, as opposed to a conventional and

restrictive imitation of reality.

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Eliot argues throughout his work that minor critics make better models for

contemporary poets than do greater poets. 142 The reason he gives for this is that the great

poets have already done what they are doing as well as it could be done, and therefore 'can

only be imitated: and the difference between influence and imitation is that influence can

fecundate, whereas imitation - especially unconscious imitation - can only sterilize' ('To

Criticize' 18). 143 This is in fact a similar point to the one Eliot makes about Leibniz and the

pre-Socratics in comparison with Bradley: because they are imperfect, it is possible for them

to have influence (i.e. be reinterpreted in new philosophies). A traditional work can only be

submitted to in an original manner if there is still something it has not said, and which was

left for the new work to say (for it). This would however involve Eliot in the curious position

of saying that only minor works can be authentically traditional. Eliot immediately adds a

parenthetical exception: '(But when I came to one brief imitation of Dante I was fifty-five

years old and knew exactly what I was doing.)' The reasons for the exception Eliot makes for

Dante are not restricted to Eliot's age, or to his talent however. Eliot does give a clue when he

adds: 'Besides, imitation of a writer in a foreign language can often be profitable - because we

cannot succeed' (18-19). Unsuccessful imitation seems preferable to successful but sterile

imitation. Sterile imitation was defined by a lack of originality which inevitably resulted from

the completed nature of the original. Lack of success in the imitation implicitly results by

contrast in something different from the original, and therefore is potentially original. Here, it

is easy to slip into thinking that Eliot, like Bloom, advocates a creative misreading of the

original which would liberate the modern writer's creativity. However, the unsuccessful

imitation must still be an imitation, and must therefore also repeat the original to a certain

142Cf. 'To Criticize' 18, 'What Dante means to Me' 126-127, 'The Function of the Clerisy' 164-165 and

'The Poet who Gave the English Speech' 621.

143One should note that Eliot describes the authentic relationship to tradition, in this case Eliot's

adaptation of Dante in Little Gidding, as 'imitating' in 'What Dante Means to Me' 128. Cf. also 'What is

a Classic?' 58.
 421

extent (and surely a poet could deliberately make a mistake in reading an author who was not

foreign to him). The author's foreigness makes the possibility of failed (and therefore

successful) imitation possible. And what underlies both foreigness, and, in an oblique

manner, Eliot's age, is a certain distance between the modern poet and his original. It is in this

that we can glimpse the necessity of Valéry to Eliot's reading of Dante.

Eliot makes a similar comparison between Dante and Shakespeare (and including

'most great English poets' with Shakespeare), saying that 'more can be learned about how to

write poetry from Dante than from any English poet', because 'they are inimitable in a way

that Dante was not' ('Dante' (1929) 252). The results of trying to imitate the great English

poets are similar both to possession, and to the individualistic writing criticised in After

Strange Gods for its repetitive and unconscious unoriginality: 'a series of stilted, forced, and

violent distortions of language.' Eliot's arguments in 'To Criticize' and 'Dante' are similar on

this point: the great English poets cannot be imitated in an original manner. Dante's

superiority as a model derives again from his language here, but for different reasons: 'The

language of each great English poet is his own language; the language of Dante is the

perfection of a common language.' This seems like self-contradiction: in 'To Criticize',

Dante's language is enabling because it is foreign, in 'Dante' because it is common,

accessible; and if it is common, it might be said that it is possible to imitate it without the

'failure' necessary for successful imitation. I would argue however that if the language of the

English poet is finished, as it is in 'To Criticize', this exhaustion must be related to the fact

that the language is 'his own'. For the poet to imitate originally, the language must be capable

of becoming both his and the model's (and thus owned by neither). By contrast, Dante's

language is 'common' in the sense of 'not his own', and can be imitated originally. The

commonalty of Dante's language then is not incompatible with its foreigness, and the great

English poet's language can be 'his own' and at the same time be close to the modern poet's

language, and therefore impossible for him to imitate originally. Eliot makes this very point
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in connection with Milton and Shakespeare: 'Milton made a great epic impossible for

succeeding generations; Shakespeare made a great poetic drama impossible; such a situation

is inevitable, and it persists until the language has so altered that there is no danger, because

no possibility, of imitation' ('Milton II' 150). The complicated (and at the same time simple)

position to which these statements point, is that Shakespeare's 'own speech' can be imitated

originally when we acquire enough distance from it, when our language alters so as to

become like a foreign language; so that Shakespeare's own language is no longer our own,

and can be related to as foreign. Dante's language can be imitated because it is not Dante's

(but common), and because we as foreigners are sufficiently distant from it. Dante's Italian

relates to the languages of modern Europe, just as it did to Medieval vulgate, as their lingua

franca: it is both common to all languages, and foreign to them (if Eliot were rigorous

however, he might perhaps have to say that only modern Italians cannot learn from Dante).

Eliot makes this point in 'What is a Classic?': 'every supreme poet, whether classic or

not, tends to exhaust the ground he cultivates, so that it must, after yielding a diminishing

crop, finally be left fallow for some generations' (64). Eliot seems again to argue that great

works cannot be used as resource by modern writers: 'That every great work of poetry tends

to make impossible the production of equally great works of the same kind is indisputable.

[Because] no first-rate poet would attempt to do again, what has already been done as well as

it can be done in his language.' But Eliot qualifies his remark by saying that it is only when

sufficient distance is achieved between the modern poet and the great work that it becomes

foreign: 'It is only after the language […] has, with time and social change, sufficiently

altered, that another dramatic poet as great as Shakespeare […] can become possible' (64).

The classic work is different in degree from the work of Shakespeare however: 'When a great

poet is also a great classic poet, he exhausts, not a form only, but the language of his time'

(65). English is to Latin what the pre-Socratics and Leibnitz are to Bradley: because it is

imperfect it can continue producing great works (66). The classic signifies the exhaustion of
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a language in which tradition is no longer possible, because there is nothing unsaid in it left

for the modern poet to say. That is why not being a classic language is an advantage for

English, but at the same time an ideal toward which English must strive (65, 67). However,

the Classic can be used as a resource by poets who are not writing in the language which the

Classic has exhausted; the death of the classical language makes it possible for the other

languages to inherit it; the Classic sacrifices itself for future literature, just as Aeneas

sacrifices himself to make Western civilization possible (67-68, 70). Exhaustion of

possibilities by a great work, and even by a Classic work which exhausts a whole language,

can still be imitated by the modern writer provided he is foreign to it. The hysteria (in the

radical sense) of a return to the past which Eliot criticises as totalitarian (see above n) is

contrasted with a relationship to the past as foreign, in which our foreigness to the past

enables us to make it live again in the present.

Eliot's insistence on the relevance of Dante to modern poetry144 is therefore based

paradoxically on Dante's remoteness: the study of Dante's contemporaries 'is vain unless we

have first made the attempt, as difficult and as hard as rebirth, to pass through the looking-

glass into a world which is just as reasonable as our own' ('Dante' (1929) 276). This might

offer a means of understanding what enables Eliot to say that certain poets are more relevant

to certain periods than to others: they are relevant because they have become distant from

that period. The enabling difficulty of Dante's language is suggested by one of its

particularities, which increased the difficulty of imitating Dante effectively in Little Gidding:

English is less copiously provided with rhyming words than Italian; and those rhymes

we have are in a way more emphatic. The rhyming words call too much attention to

144Cf. 'Dante' (1920), where Eliot disputes the idea that conditions have changed so much from Dante's

age to the modern self-conscious one that we are unable to appreciate philosophical poetry such as

Dante's (160).
 424

themselves: Italian is the one language known to me in which the exact rhyme can

always achieve its effect […] without the risk of obtruding itself (128).

Eliot argues in 'Scylla and Charybdis' that it is precisely the conflict between the rhyming

word and its meaning and associations which makes the search for the right word impossible.

In particular, Eliot discusses the musical and referential value of 'antelucan', as a word to

describe the twilight before the morning in the Dantesque passage of Little Gidding, and his

rejection of it because in the context of the passage 'the word would have drawn attention to

itself' (8). 145 In 'What Dante Means to Me' (128-129), Eliot discusses dilemmas in the

imitation of Dante which frustrate his search for the right word similar to those in 'Scylla and

Charybdis'. This is not to argue that Dante represents a perfect language, and that the

imperfection of Eliot's language by contrast makes him fail in his imitation of Dante (and

therefore succeed in writing something new himself). This would constitute the Bloomian-

Romantic mimetic rivalry with the (superior/inferior) past. Rather, Dante's language is not

exempt from the dilemma discussed in 'Scylla and Charybdis', 146 but there is something in the

difference between English and Italian - in Dante's foreigness to English - which puts his

English imitator in that position.

We touched earlier on Eliot's argument that the Scylla and Charybdis alternatives to

which language confines the poet prevents the poem from ever being 'finished', in the sense

of finding the right word which would allow it to transcend its finitude. This boon is related

to the argument that the imperfection of language makes the poem surprising. Eliot opens his

lecture by writing:

145Ronald Gaskell points out that 'antelucan' is borrowed (whether consciously or unconsciously) from

Purgatorio xxvii, 109 ('Eliot and Dante' 177. Agenda 23:3-4 (Autumn-Winter 1985-1986). 167-179).

146The imperfection of words is described in that lecture as putting the poet 'in the position of the

Homeric narrator' steering between Scylla and Charybdis (6).

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My writings, in prose and verse, may or may not have surprised other people: but I

know that they always, on first sight, surprise myself. I have often found that my

most interesting or original ideas, when put into words and marshalled in final order,

were ideas which I had not been aware of holding ('Scylla and Charybdis' 5).

Surprise, prevents the poem from conforming to a programme: 'It is ordinarily supposed that

a writer knows exactly what he wants to say, before he sits down […]. Yet I have always

discovered that anything I have written - anything at least that pleased me - was a different

thing from the composition which I thought I was going to write' (5). Surprise also works like

inspiration here, making the poet produce something of which he was unaware, and which he

cannot programme. The poet relates to himself in the act of writing as he does to tradition,

saying something which was there, but only latently, and as something different (from what it

was before he said it). It is the product of the advent of another in the poet. 147 And this is due

to the imperfect nature of language:

In avoiding the several dangers of navigation, the poet cannot be too much concerned

with the choice of the port which he hopes eventually to reach. It is necessary,

147Eliot praises surprise as an essential ingredient in poetry 'Marvell' 295 and 300, 'Dryden' 307-308,

Sacred Wood Pref., ix and 'Perfect Critic' 2. Eliot however deprecates the 'unexpected' in literature as

only being important in farces (CWV VII, Intro., xiv). He also demurs from Johnson's assumption that

something which surprises us must surprise us at once (like Coleridge's shooting-star), because it does

not allow for 'the possibility of any development or expansion of enjoyment' ('Johnson' 183). That

gradual development (like the influence of Dante), is necessary if surprise is not to accompany the

exhaustion, the 'finishing' of the object of surprise. Derrida argues that the exhaustion and finitude of

formalist structuralism makes surprises impossible ('Force et Signification' 41/24-25). Compare also

Raymond Williams, 'T. S. Eliot' 146.

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certainly, in a poem of any length, to have a plan, to lay a course. But the final work

will be another work than that which the author set out to write; and will, as I have

already suggested, be something of a surprise to the author himself (9). 148

The surprise Eliot speaks of is the surprise which must attend the advent of the other in the

original submission to tradition. It prevents the accomplishment of the dialectic of the perfect

word and the finished poem. And it is the fact of being finished which prevents a poem from

being imitated originally (from being traditional). Moreover, the other to which Scylla and

Charybdis makes the poet submit is language. It is the submission to the language granted to

the poet by the other (of tradition, of community) which makes the poem surprising. 149

This leads us to the first of three points which Eliot makes about what 'one learns'

from Dante. Dante, Eliot writes is the most 'scrupulous, painstaking and

conscious practitioner of the craft' of poetry ('What Dante Means to Me' 132). 150 The sense in

which Eliot uses the word craft in this case comes as close as at any time to Heidegger's: 'The

whole study and practice of Dante seems to me to teach that the poet should be the servant of

his language, rather than the master of it. This sense of responsibility is one of the marks of

the classical poet' (133). The craft of poetry involves the poet's submission before language.

148The word 'antelucan', which this process imposes on the poet, is described as a 'trouvaille' (8), the

same word that Eliot uses to describe Dryden's invention, which, as we saw above, works like

inspiration.

149Eliot's submission to tradition works in a similar manner to Timothy Clark's concept of performance,

in which 'with a writer sensitive to current codes of performance, social context, and constraints, it may

render the hiatus in self-reading an openness to an eruptive or inventive leap, rendering the text an

event' ('Orientations towards a Theory of Inspiration (with Shelley as a Closing Example)' 95. The

Critical Review (New South Wales) 34 (1994). 85-112).

150Eliot makes a similar point in 'Scylla and Charybdis' 10.

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The poet becomes a craftsman by accepting the limitations of language Eliot speaks of in

'Scylla and Charybdis', and therefore by accepting to be surprised and inspired by language.

That acceptance also involves a form of generosity: 'To pass on to one's posterity one's own

language, more highly developed, more refined, more precise than when one wrote it, that is

the highest possible achievement of the poet as poet.' In this, Dante and Shakespeare contrast

with poets 'who were privileged by their genius to abuse the English language […] so that it

could be of no use to later poets.' A submission before language which makes possible a gift

of language to future poets is contrasted with a domination over language which is,

ultimately, selfish. We knew before, we might say, that the condition of originality is the

surprise which accompanies the submission to the other, and lets an absolutely other arrive.

But it is only in relation to Dante that Eliot makes clear that it is a submission to language

which is involved. And that submission before language is a lesson Eliot specifically learns

from Dante. Eliot's relationship to Dante, and specifically to Dante's foreignness, puts him,

when trying to imitate Dante, in the very condition of Scylla and Charybdis which makes

poetic craftsmanship possible. It might be said that Dante is not necessary, and that all poets

whether they are trying to imitate Dante or not are faced with Eliot's Scylla and Charybdis

alternative. But Eliot argues that all original poetry must be traditional, and in some sense a

rewriting of past authors. Therefore, the poet must relate to tradition in the way that Eliot

describes himself relating to Dante; in other words, only a foreignness like Dante's makes an

authentic relationship to tradition possible. Only Dante's foreignness makes a genuine

imitation of him possible. Dante is a model for all inspiration. The inspiration involved in the

submission to language is also an inspiration by the (necessarily foreign) tradition which one

imitates. 151

151This notion of inspiration as submission to language underlies Eliot's only positive discussion of

inspiration (to my knowledge): 'if the word "inspiration" is to have any meaning, it must mean […] that

the speaker or writer is uttering something which he may not wholly understand - or which he may even

misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him' ('Virgil and the Christian World' 122). The
 428

This argument is supported by Eliot's discussion of surprise in 'Dante' (1929). Dante's

Brunetto and Ulysses episodes 'both have the quality of surprise [Eliot's emphasis] which Poe

declared to be essential to poetry. This surprise, at its highest, could by nothing be better

illustrated than by the final lines with which Dante dismisses the damned master whom he

loves and respects [my emphasis]' (247). Dante describes Brunetto as running 'like a winner'

even though he is damned. The surprise is, partly, at the vitality of a past master, and is

analogous to the surprise which must accompany the vitality of the classic when it is

rewritten by the modern poet. Dante also exemplifies a kind of 'genuine poetry [which] can

communicate before it is understood' ('Dante' (1929) 238). And this is particularly the case,

Eliot argues, 152 with foreign languages. Rather than implying a logocentric myth of non-

linguistic direct expression, such communication must, I would suggest, be an experience

analogous to the surprise which, in 'Scylla', was caused by the poet's idea of what the poem

would be not being realised by that poem. In the point we are considering, the poem's

communication takes place before it can be understood in the way a poem's idea is

understood, before it can be programmed by understanding. Eliot is able to imitate Dante and

example Eliot is referring to is Virgil's possible anticipation of the birth of Christ in his fourth Eclogue.

Eliot argues that Virgil 'makes a liaison between the old world and the new, and of his peculiar position

we may take the fourth Eclogue as a symbol' (123). This liaison is, furthermore, symbolised in Virgil by

Aeneas, who submits to fate in order to make possible the Roman Empire, and the Christian civilization

to which that Empire led, without being aware that he was doing this; just as the hypothetically inspired

Virgil in the fourth Eclogue anticipated Christianity. Inspiration is analogous to fatum, and submits the

writer to the grounding of community and the accomplishment of tradition.

152Eliot describes certain foreign poetry 'which I could not translate, containing […] sentences I could

not construe, [and] conveyed something immediate and vivid, which was unique, different from

anything in English. So in poetry you can, now and then, penetrate into another country, so to speak,

before your passport has been issued and your ticket taken' ('Social Function' 24).
 429

be influenced by him because he can be surprised by him, and he can be surprised by him

because Dante is foreign, because he can communicate before he is understood.

Eliot writes of the question of surprise in 'Scylla', that '[a]ll this has a bearing upon

the endlessly discussed question of form and content' (9). This is the question which Eliot

discusses in greatest depth in connection with Dante. We touched above on the fact that Eliot

argues in 1929 that it is possible to enjoy poetry which is penetrated by beliefs one does not

share. However, he argues in the note to Part II of the essay that it is impossible to effect a

complete severance between belief and the experience of reading poetry (269), and that '[i]t is

possible, and sometimes necessary, to argue that full understanding must identify itself with

full belief' (270). 153 The possibility of appreciating works of art irrespective of their belief is

limited by the fact that the understanding which we require for appreciation of them must

sometimes lead us to believe them (or reject them). This leads to Eliot's notion that ideas

which are widely accepted are those which penetrate poetry with the greatest ease, and that

the philosophy which Dante uses as material for the Comedia exemplifies such an accepted

belief. 154 Eliot takes the discussion up again in 'Scylla and Charybdis', in which he argues (as

he does in both 'Dante' essays) against both purely didactic and purely formal poetry (10).

These extremes have two limiting cases: poetry which the reader can enjoy 'while paying

conscious attention only to the way in which [the poet] says' what he has to say, and about

which the question '"why is this a poem, and not versified prose?"' might be asked, and poetry

which the reader can enjoy 'while paying conscious attention only to what [the poet] is

153Cf. D. M. Armstrong. 'Does Knowledge Entail Belief.' Aristotelian Society Proceedings 70 (1969-

1970). 21-37.

154Cf. 'Dante' (1929) 162-163.

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saying', and about which the question '"why is this not nonsense?"' might be asked (13; 16).

Dante, exemplifies the first kind of poet for Eliot (10). 155

Eliot develops in 'Scylla' the position he held in 1929 however by arguing that the

'philosophy of the poem' is different from the philosophy which provides the subject matter

for the poem (Eliot calls this the 'origin philosophy'); Aquinas's philosophy is altered by its

penetration into the Comedia. Because of that, philosophies which are trivial outside of the

poem (as, Eliot argues, is the case with Mallarmé), can be worthwhile inside the poem in

their transformed state (14). This would mean, in the case of someone like Shelley, that Eliot

did not consider the philosophy which penetrated his poetry trivial, but that it had not been

transformed in such a way as to become acceptable in the poem. 156 Eliot is not expansive

about the particular characteristics of the philosophy once it is 'composted' (18) into the

poem. He does however say: 'Different philosophies, or opposed philosophical opinions

which cannot in the philosophical area of discourse be maintained at once, may thus be

united and poetically reconciled' (17). Controversial or trivial philosophies may become

accepted once composted into the poem. Thus, to return to the litmus test of Shelley, one

might say that it is not the deficiencies of Shelley's beliefs as beliefs (demonstrated by

abstract argument), but the manner in which he 'composted' them which makes it difficult to

appreciate his poetry as poetry. Two different kinds of intelligence seems to be presupposed,

155Eliot also argues that 'it is the form not the content that makes the poem' when the content is

commonplace (as in the case of Dante), or because we don't know what it is (as in the case of Mallarmé)

(12). How can we read Dante for what he has to say, and at the same time say that it is the form which

makes the poem? This almost theological crux points to Eliot's initial premise that there is no such thing

as pure content or pure form. Dante's poetry is 'made' by the form (insofar as the content is

commonplace), but when we read it we attend to the content (because of Dante's lucidity, which makes

the form not draw attention to itself).

156Cf. 'Shelley and Keats' 82. Use of Poetry. 78-94.

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which could be distinguished in entirely Platonic terms: one intelligence demonstrates the

truth or falsehood of the beliefs, the other demonstrates their acceptability. The intelligence

required by the poem's philosophy for Eliot seems to be a rhetorical one.

Eliot's composting might then merely be a description of the process which makes

possible the suspension of disbelief which Eliot speaks of in Dante; like rhetoric in Plato, the

philosophy of the poem might relate to the origin philosophy, as the plausible to the true, the

sensual to the supersensual, aesthetic to philosophy. But it does more than that. The process

which changes the philosophy is in fact the same as that which surprises the poet: 'But the

final work will be another work than that which the author set out to write; and will, as I have

already suggested, be something of a surprise to the author himself. For the idea behind the

poem will always be less than the meaning of the poem' (9). The poet transmutes the idea by

letting it surprise him, 157 and the poem might make it possible to entertain a philosophy

which is acknowledged to be wrong (e.g. Lucretius's). But a deconstructive relationship to

that philosophy might also enable the philosopher to see it as blindness and insight; to see the

possibility of understanding and going beyond Lucretius as proceeding from Lucretius. From

that point of view, the philosophy which demonstrated the limitations of Lucretius could be

entertained along with Lucretius's. And this involves the recognition, in each philosophical

point of view, of the other points of view which are contained in it as possibilities. In other

words, the relationship to a contested philosophy which allows it to surprise the interpretive

gesture which contests it, in which an original delimitation of a past philosophy (as for

example that of Lucretius) is only possible by submitting to it, is a characteristic of

philosophy. Therefore, a philosophy does not need to be composted by the poem in order to

become acceptable to people who disagree with it. Eliot's attempt to distinguish between

157Eliot's formulation recalls his earlier definition of wit: 'It involves, probably, a recognition, implicit

in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible' ('Andrew

Marvell' 303. Selected Essays Pt. V, 292-304).

 432

poetic philosophy and philosophy proper attributes to poetic philosophy something which

also characterises philosophy proper. 158 Indeed, the characteristics of all poetry for Eliot (as

submitting to language, letting the absolutely new arrive in and from the absolutely

traditional) are the characteristics of all philosophy. We are confronted again with the

problem to which we confronted Lacoue-Labarthe at the end of Chapter 1 (Exrg.).

Eliot's distinction between the poem's philosophy and the philosophy proper, I would

argue, depends on what the poem does with the philosophy which it takes over; it is a

question of how it uses the freedom (shared with philosophy proper) to entertain

contradictory or discredited philosophies. The 'philosophic theories' of the poet, Eliot writes,

'will make their appearance in his poetry, but in a form in which they are no longer

maintained as theories, but presented as something experienced, and go to compose, together

with his experience of life of all other kinds, the material of his poem' (17). How can we

differentiate an experienced philosophy from one maintained as a theory, in a manner which

is not aesthetic (e.g. we do not believe it as philosophy, but that non-belief is regulated by

what we do believe philosophically, like what seems true is by the truth in the Phaedrus)?

This question is also posed by Eliot in relation to Dante. When reading Dante, '[w]e are not

studying the philosophy, we see it, as part of the ordered world' ('Dante' (1920) 170). 159 In

both cases, a poetic philosophy which is seen or experienced, is opposed to one which is

studied for its merit as philosophy. What I would argue is that Eliot's concept of the role of

158Eliot acknowledges this to some extent when he writes that 'in this operation [of reconciling different

philosophies] there is an intellectual work of organisation, which is analogous to the work of a

conceptual philosopher. And I should maintain that the experience of a sensitive reader, in assimilating

such a poem, is analogous in kind to his experience in assimilating the work of a philosopher' ('Scylla

and Charybdis' 17; my emphasis).

159Lucretius aims to 'find the concrete poetic equivalent for [his] system - to find its complete

equivalent in vision' (161).

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belief in poetry is, to a certain extent, aesthetic, and that any concept of belief must be, if it

wishes to avoid making poetry and philosophy both derivative of an archi-poetic-philosophy.

Eliot thus praises Dante for a combination of feelings and intellect, and for an

iconography, which, on one level, are both entirely aesthetic. The essentials of this position

are developed in 1920, in Eliot's discussion of Dante's allegory, which he distinguishes from

the origin philosophy of the Comedia: 'The philosophy is an ingredient, it is a part of Dante's

world just as it is a part of life; the allegory is a scaffold on which the poem is built' (163). He

argues against Henry Dwight Sedgwick 160 and Landor's Petrarch, both of whom conflate

the allegory with the origin philosophy, although for opposite reasons: Petrarch deplores the

moral, and only admires the non-didactic and "poetic" passages of the Comedia, whereas

Sedgwick reduces the poem to its didactic content (the result for both is that they fail to see

that the emotion of any particular scene is related to that of the other scenes) (163-164).

I would suggest that Eliot's distinction between scaffold and ingredient corresponds

to the later distinction between poetic and origin philosophy. By reducing the first to the

second, both Sedgwick and (Landor's) Petrarch are unable to understand the function of the

poetic philosophy in the poem. When Eliot writes that 'the artistic emotion presented by any

episode of the Comedy is dependent upon the whole', and 'is always preserved entire, but is

modified by the position assigned to the person in the eternal scheme' (167), the whole which

makes this possible is the scaffold. And the scaffold has the same status as what Eliot later

calls the poetic philosophy:

It is not essential that the allegory […] should be understood - only that its presence

be justified. The emotional structure within the scaffold is what must be understood -

the structure made possible by the scaffold. This structure is an ordered scale of
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human emotions [in which] the emotions are limited, and also extended in

significance by their place in the scheme (168)

The philosophy of the poem, in Dante's case, is used to provide the relations between the

emotions. Eliot argues in 'Social Function' (18-19) that ideas are universal, whereas emotions

are particular. In the Comedia, the acceptance of the idea which penetrates the poem makes it

possible for it to universalise the particularity of the emotions. Like the points of view in

Eliot's thesis, the particularity of the emotions is not erased (they are 'preserved entire'), but it

is at the same time limited and extended.

Eliot in 1929 defines the experience of the poem on the strength of such uniqueness

and repeatability:

The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. It is

very much like our intenser experiences of other human beings. There is a first, or an

early moment which is unique, of shock and surprise, even of terror (Ego dominus

tuus); a moment which can never be forgotten, but which is never repeated integrally;

and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger

whole of experience […] ('Dante' 250-251).

It is the scaffold, the poetic philosophy, which makes this process possible in Dante, and in

every poem (since no poems, as Eliot says, are entirely devoid of ideas). And what

differentiates the poem from abstract philosophy is the survival of the uniqueness of emotions

in a larger whole of experience. Philosophy, although it must be surprised by the tradition it

reads, and must see each philosophy it reads and writes as unique, is denied by Eliot the

uniqueness of emotion which is found in poetry. This point is exemplified by Eliot's

160Of whose Dante the 1920 Dante essay was originally a review.
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argument against the assumption that blessedness can only be a monotonous subject in

poetry:161 'It ['la sua voluntate è nostra pace'] is the mystery of the inequality, and of the

indifference of that inequality, in blessedness, of the blessed. It is all the same, and yet each

degree differs' (265). Dante epitomises the poetic description of the state of absolute

uniqueness and repetition which is the apotheosis of what Eliot describes as the particular

function of poetry.162

This function in turn depends on sensual images: Dante's 'difficulty [is] in making us

apprehend sensuously the various states and stages of blessedness' (265). Eliot thus argues

that 'for a competent poet, allegory means clear visual images' (242), and writes that 'Hell is a

state which can only be thought of, and perhaps only experienced, by the projection of

sensory images; and the resurrection of the body has perhaps a deeper meaning than we

understand' (250). The image works like Plato's eikon, as a sensual representation of

something inaccessible.163 But Eliot goes further than Plato (and also repeats him), by

arguing that this inapprehensible can only be thought of and experienced through images:

Eliot does not present it as defined by reason. The image is no longer a sensual moment in the

passage to the supersensual. Eliot's reference to the resurrection of the body suggests, so it

seems to me, that sensual perception continues in heaven, in other words that Eliot refuses to

countenance the Aufhebung of the sensible in his image. This possibility was posed in Plato

161Cf. 'Dante' (1929) 262 and 'Dante' (1920) 169, and compare 'Failure of Amiel' 86.

162Lucretius's philosophy is criticised, by contrast, because it was 'not rich enough in variety of feeling,

applied itself to life too uniformly, to supply the material for a successful poem' ('Dante' (1920) 162).

Compare also the criticism of Hopkins's poem, that it 'will give us more of the same thing, an

accumulation, rather than a development of thought or feeling' (After Strange Gods Ch. 2, 47).

163Eliot writes that 'the college discipline of Plato and Aristotle' makes it easier to inhabit Dante's world

(276).
 436

by the status of the beloved's body as image. Eliot's remark suggests that the body enjoys a

similar status in his poetics.

This position underlies Eliot's refusal to consider the Vita Nuova as either biography

or 'an entire allegory' such as 'a personification of an abstract virtue, intellectual or moral'

(272).164 Again, the extent to which Eliot is similar to Plato on this point is impressive. The

Vita Nuova, Eliot says, describes a sexual experience which Dante transforms into an image

for divine love (274-275). Eliot describes in fact the divine love which turns the beloved into

an eikon in the Phaedrus, and which makes inspiration take place. This, Eliot argues, is 'a

mixture according to a recipe not available to the modern mind' (272). That is because

'[n]owadays "confessions", of an insignificant sort, pour from the press; everyone met son

cœur à nu,165 or pretends to; "personalities" succeed each other in interest.' What prevents the

modern world from understanding that sensual love can be an image for divine love is its

individualism. What makes it possible for Dante is the impersonality of his experiences: they

'seemed to him of some importance; not of importance because they had happened to him and

because he, Dante Alighieri, was an important person […], but important in themselves; and

therefore they seemed to have some philosophical and impersonal value' (273). Dante

experiences the pathos of divine love, and because of that is able to turn his love into an

eikon.166

In 1920, the allegory realised the philosophy of the poem as vision, and worked as a

scaffold that enabled the emotions to be related to each other. In 1929, allegory is constituted

by sensual images for the inapprehensible: 'One can only feel awe at the power of the master

164Cf. 'Marvell' 301.

165'Bares his heart'; Mon cœur mis à nu is an autobiographical draft work by Baudelaire, first published

in 1887, some twenty years after his death.

166Cf. 'Virgil and the Christian World?' 131.

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who could thus at every moment realize the inapprehensible in visual images' (267-268).167 I

would like to suggest the following overview of these two positions. The intellectual scaffold

is what enables the emotion, the sensual, to be extended beyond itself into the spiritual, and

to become an eikon. The ability to make such an image is the depersonalisation which is

made possible by an authentic relationship to the past as foreign exemplified by Dante. But

the image here is no longer programmed aesthetically. And the inability of the poem to

sublate its finitude is experienced by the poet, as inspiration, surrender, and extinction.168

Inspiration, as a surrender to the other of language, involves for Eliot (a repetition of) the

same suffering which attended it in the Phaedrus, and which was rewritten into it by Valéry.

In that inspiration, and in that eikon, the other arrives as something absolutely original, and

absolutely repeated. The surrender involved in inspiration for Eliot prevents it from being

programmed by aesthetics. Eliot's is an aesthetic mimetology without the subject or the image

of aesthetics, and therefore not aesthetic at all. In other words, although the mimetology and

erotic inspiration which underlie the definition Eliot gives to poetry is fundamentally

Platonic, it is an inspiration and a mimesis which has taken into account the rewriting of

Plato-Kant by Valéry. The paradox of inspiration as a division of the subject (identified by

Valéry), is rewritten by Eliot in a concept of the poet in which he is active in his submission

to tradition in the act of creation. Although Eliot does not say so explicitly, we can see the

lessons of the critiques which he simultaneously found in and turned against Valéry

conditioning his reading of Dante's imagery. Explicitly, Eliot says that he can only read Dante

authentically because of what makes him foreign. Valéry, paradoxically, represents the age

which Eliot belongs to, and which makes him foreign to Dante. Eliot is able to read a non-

167Cf. also 'What Dante Means to Me' 134.

168Gaskell rightly sees Dante as the place where Eliot articulates his concept of divine love (Gaskell,

'Eliot and Dante' 167), but, on the basis of a very general reading of the 'dominant tone' (169) of Eliot's

poems, goes on to argue rather implausibly that Eliot thinks 'that the love of God excludes human love'

(170).
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aesthetic inspirational mimesis in Dante because of the transformation to those concepts

which are brought about in Valéry.

Eliot suggests this in an oblique manner at the end of 'Scylla and Charybdis', when he

describes Valéry's Cimetière Marin as a traditional poem: Such lines as 'La larve file où se

formaient des pleurs' and 'Tout va sous terre et rentre dans le jeu' have 'all the force of a

commonplace thought expressed in words which no one has found before: […] I feel a kind

of wonder and admiration as at a miracle of resuscitation of the dead' (19). Valéry's poem can

only resuscitate the dead by a submission to the dead of tradition, and this is what Eliot

suggests happens to Valéry himself, when Eliot contrasts him with Gray (in a manner which

also suggests a contrast with Dante):

Valéry's poem has what I call the philosophical structure: an organisation, not merely

of successive responses to the situation, but of further responses to his own

responses. He has put more of himself into the poem - to that point at which the

surrendering of the maximum of one's being to the poem ends by arriving at the

maximum of impersonality (19-20).

Valéry is distinguished, Eliot goes on to say, by the fact that he could 'have distinguished

himself as a philosopher in a non-poetic sense' (20), as that most unique and monstrous169

being with which Eliot contrasts Dante, because Dante is the poet par excellence who took

169'A poet who is also a metaphysician, and unites the two activities, is conceivable as an unicorn or a

wyvern is conceivable: he is possible like some of Meinong's Annahmen; but such a poet would be a

monster, just as (in my opinion) M. Valéry's Monsieur Teste is a monster' ('A Brief Introduction' 13).

The only other unique person to combine these functions, as we saw above, is Coleridge.
 439

over his philosophy from someone else.170 And this results, in Valéry's poem, in his giving

more of himself. Thus far, Valéry differs from Gray and from Dante as the aesthetic from the

traditional. But in so doing, he also rejoins the classic in a surrender of his personality.171

The more nineteenth-century he is, the more traditional, because the tradition which Eliot

reads in Dante is made possible by the nineteenth-century rewriting of inspiration by Valéry.

Valéry's surrender makes possible the resurrection of Dante for Eliot.172 It is all a matter of

how to remember the other:173

170Cf. 'Dante' (1920) 162-163. It is interesting that Valéry advances an almost identical idea, in

connection with a translation of St. John of the Cross into French verse by a French monk named Father

Cyprien, in 'Spiritual Canticles' (1944). CWV VII, 279-294. Eliot writes of St. John of the Cross that in

his poems 'the emotion is so directly the consequence of the idea that the personality of the author is,

somehow, annihilated' ('Scylla and Charybdis' 15).

171Eliot argues that the French Symbolists continued the metaphysical tradition which originated with

Dante into the nineteenth century ('Clark Lecture # 1' 59).

172A clue to this possibility is found in Eliot's oblique reference to Valéry's Mediterranean identity

(which Valéry shares with Derrida, cf. 'L'autre cap' 38, 63 ff., 97-98 n 8), as evidenced in his

association of Valéry with the centre Meditérranéen ('Scylla and Charybdis' 5), and of the theme of

Scylla and Charybdis with 'that Mediterranean world from which our culture springs' (6). Derrida points

out that Valéry too thinks of the Mediterranean in these terms ('L'autre cap' 63-64), and himself argues

that his attempt to demarcate himself from Valéry's position, and renew Europe's ageing tradition, is in a

certain way part of his particular identity as a European and an Algerian (from the Southern edge of the

Mediterranean), combining the youthfulness of one culture with the deep roots of the other (13-14).

Eliot, in the course of the argument we have just been reading, in which he describes Valéry's return to

traditionality, says that Le Cimetière Marin (which exemplifies that return) displays 'a refreshment of

French metric from Italian sources' (19; cf. also 'From Poe to Valéry' 36) (Derrida also comments on

Valéry's proximity to Italy in 'L'autre cap' 38: he was 'close to Italy through his birth and death').

Valéry's Mediterranean proximity to Italy, we might suggest, makes possible a modern return to Dante;

his role in Eliot's poetical history is that of Virgil, but in reverse. Virgil's virtue is to lead us from the
 440

pagan to the Christian world, and at the same time to Dante ('What is a Classic?' 70-71; 'Virgil and the

Christian World' 131). Valéry makes it possible to make Dante live again in modern poetry. In 'Virgil

and the Christian World', Eliot identifies in The Eclogues certain Virgilian virtues which anticipate

Christianity. Valéry wrote a version of the Eclogues in verse shortly before his death (it was finished in

1944, but first published in 1953, two years after Eliot's broadcast talk). The one thing which both Eliot

and Valéry admire in the Eclogues is the attitude of the shepherds to love ('Virgil and the Christian

World' 131; CWV VII 344 n), although Valéry also deplores in his preface to the version the bucolic

theme as a whole ('Variations on the "Eclogues"' 296). Valéry's meditation on his translation closely

resembles Eliot's 'Scylla and Charybdis', and Eliot's discussion of his own version of Dante. Although

not enchanted by the theme of the Eclogues, Valéry 'yielded': 'My habit is to give way to those agents of

fate known as "Others." I have no will, except on two or three absolute and deep-rooted matters. For the

rest, I am pliable to the point of weakness and stupidity, as a result of a curious indifference that is

founded, possibly, on my conviction that no one knows what he is doing or what he will become […].

All the events of my own life, though apparently my own acts, were the work of some other, and each is

signed with my name' (297) (cf. Derrida. 'The Time of a thesis: punctuations' 36-37. Trans. Kathleen

McLaughlin. Philosophy in France today. Ed. Alan Montefiore. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. 34-

50). In writing his version of Virgil, Valéry enounces the general principle of the submission to the

other. He also makes similar remarks to Eliot's about the difference between the value of a thought in

the poem, and its state when abstracted from that poem (298-299); about the (origin) idea of a poem

being transformed (Valéry says 'translated') by the act of writing into something surprising (300); and

about the relation of modern to ancient languages (301-302). Valéry also describes a feeling of kinship

between himself and Virgil, similar to that between Eliot and Dante. Virgil is a kind of latter-day

nineteenth century poet, and represents for Valéry the kind of poetry which he would like to write

(305); Virgil's Latin is the language of the gods (306). And Valéry, in translating Virgil, goes beyond

literal faithfulness to his poetry, and identifies his act of translation with what he imagines to have been

Virgil's original act of composition (303-304), i.e. imitates Virgil's act rather than his product. As

Valéry is to Virgil, Eliot is to Dante, and, whether Valéry communicated his Virgilian project to Eliot

during their meeting in 1945 or not, Eliot relates to Valéry as Dante to Virgil.
 441

This is the use of memory:

For liberation - not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past (Little Gidding III, 7-10).

173Cf. Derrida's remark that assuming responsibility for a future Europe involves that democracy having

'the structure of a promise - and therefore the memory of what carries the future here and now' ('L'autre

cap' 76; cf. also 21-22, 67, 69, 75).

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CONCLUSION

1.

In conclusion, I would argue that a certain approach to mimesis underlies the various theories

of poetry that we have examined, and that each theory can be shown to be a development

from another one. By 'development', I am not suggesting, as the foregoing discussion should

have made abundantly clear, that one theory is an improvement on the other. Each theory,

rather, is a mimesis of the other, in which anything which might be called an improvement

over the previous theory was actually already contained in that theory as a possibility.

I will now retrace the steps of this thesis, in order to summarise the relationship

between the different concepts of mimesis which it has analysed. I will give particular

emphasis to the manner in which each theory develops (imitates) the other one, rather than

(as in the main body of the thesis) to the detail of each particular theory. I would also like to

include a change in perspective. The concepts of mimesis which we have been examining are

all intimately related to particular concepts of subjectivity, which are articulated with most

insistence in connection with the question of the creative process. Ironically then, a thesis

which has both attempted to critique subject-centered concepts of creation, and followed the

theories of writers who have themselves developed a similar critique, returns again and again

to the question of how it is that a poet can write poetry. Each of the paradoxes which have

been confronted in the course of this thesis, 'as well as' being paradoxes of mimesis, are also

paradoxes of the subject (the 'as well as' highlighting our difficulty in separating the two

issues). The concept of the proper impropriety of mimesis - the impossibility to define it

according to a certain concept of definition - is intimately connected in Plato to the

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impropriety of the mimetic poet, who is everybody and nobody. Mimesis is criticised by

Plato for causing a kind of depersonalisation, when for example he says that the guardians of

the city should not impersonate other craftsmen, because this would adulterate their virtuous

personality. But that very impropriety is also the condition of the subject which we (and Plato

implicitly) opposed to the subject of metaphysics. Similarly, the gift of inspiration with

which each concept of mimesis in this thesis defines the specificity of poetry, is only possible

if the subject is improper, and not identical with himself. Every theory of mimesis in this

thesis is therefore distinguished and conditioned by its definition of the creative process, and

of the subject of that process.

Our discussion of Plato began with his attempt, in Republic X, to devalorise mimesis

as an inferior imitation of the truth, to which he (and Heidegger) opposed a superior

imitation, which was constituted by the name and the law. That form of imitation, articulated

in the Cratylus and the Laws, sought to distance itself from a concept of representation

(which was criticised in Republic II-III and affiliated by Plato to Sophism) as impersonation,

and the substitution of the proper for the improper. We also argued that the concept of

mimesis which Plato devalorises provides the matrix for what aesthetics valorises as its own

particular sphere (restricted freedom from reason, sensual gratification, play). The concept of

depersonalisation criticised by Plato, which provides the matrix of the polemic with the

subject that characterises the theories of mimesis traced through this essay, also therefore lies

at the heart of the aesthetic which he criticises. Plato thus, in the first instance, critiques

aesthetics in the name of a virile lawful subject. But mimetic depersonalisation is in Plato

also an outcome of an assertion of personality: the kind of depropriation condemned by Plato,

both in people and in city states, is caused by the unbridled (personal) desire which is stoked

by mimesis.
 444

The argument resurfaces in Eliot when he argues that possession is the result of a

kind of exasperation of personality. Both Plato and Eliot's critique of depersonalisation is

founded on a critique (more or less explicit) of personality. Both also share a suspicion, in the

field of economics, of what might be described today as the profit motive; an economy

organised around the satisfaction of subjective desires, they argue, results in interpersonal

aggressivity and war. Plato and Eliot represent as representative thinkers of impersonality,

the beginning and the end of the development we traced. Plato valorises in the Phaedrus a

kind of impersonality which he attempts to distinguish from the impersonality that he

criticised in the mimetic poet, and opposes a concept of inspiration as pathos to the

(depersonalising) concept of personality which he criticises in the Republic and in his

polemic with the Sophists. That concept of inspiration is allied to a concept of the gift as

absolute generosity, which exceeds the economy of exchange that is predicated on the

subject. The Phaedrus also describes divine love as a divine mimesis, in which the beloved

becomes an icon of the supersensual. The divine lover is the truth of the mimetic poet: the

latter merely gratifies the senses, the divine beloved is a sensual imitation of the

supersensual. For Plato then, the issues of aesthetic mimetology and the subject are closely

related, and his condemnation of one kind of mimesis goes hand in hand with his

condemnation of a particular concept of personality.

Although Plato suggests analogies between the poet and the divine lover, and, more

fundamentally, that the divine lover might be a poet - and his beloved a poem - he at the same

time shies away from that recognition. This is because the concept of the poet as divine lover

poses a certain problem for Plato, which dogs every theory of mimesis. Divine love, in Plato's

description, is considered as pure passivity - it is not done by anyone. For poetry to be

inspired by divine love, Plato would have to conceive of a poet who was both absolutely

active, and absolutely passive. Plato's concept of subjectivity and of artistic creation is

confronted by the paradox of active passivity which underlies the concept of mimesis.
 445

Mimesis must be absolutely imitative of and passively submit to the other, while at the same

time being absolutely original, and absolutely responsible for the advent of that other. It is

only by virtue of such an aporia that the gift, and a demarcation from the aggravated concept

of personality criticised by Plato are possible.

At the same time as he avoids the paradoxical concept of a poet inspired by divine

love, Plato's description of the experience of the divine lover during his inspiration points

toward the authentic concept of the gift required by such a concept. Plato interrupts the

accomplishment of the aesthetic constituted by the beloved as sensual icon of the

supersensual, by describing the supersensual as inescapably remote, a remoteness which the

lover experiences as tragic suffering. The lover and the beloved are absent to each other in

that suffering, and can only relate to each other as mimetic images (eidohla). Mimesis, and

the writing which 'represents' it in the Phaedrus, is what ensures the absence which prevents

the accomplishment of the subject and of aesthetics. Although Plato attempts to distinguish

divine love from poetry and from mimesis, he betrays an implicit awareness of the necessity

of reading them together. And it is only by reading them together, and confronting the

paradox of active passivity which this presupposes, that the project attempted by Plato can be

attempted. The suffering and the division of the lover during the experience of divine

inspiration points toward the realisation which is implicit in Plato's dialogues, and which is

left open for other writers to explore (imitate).

Plato then 'resolves' the paradox of the poet's active passivity by avoiding it, and

simply passing over in silence the event of inspiration in the poet. It is in this very silence that

Kant finds the possibility of writing much of his third Critique, which is as much a critique of

Plato's aesthetics as critique of Judgement. Kant's presentation of poetry as creating the same

effect as the divine beloved icon in the Phaedrus, and of the poet as inspired in a similar

manner to Plato's lover, forces him to address Plato's paradox. Kant's solution to the paradox
 446

of mimesis (namely the free imitation by man of Nature's freedom) is at the same time a

particular concept of the subject, which involves a paradox of its own. This solution presents

the poet as passive in one sense, since he is merely imitating Nature. But Kant's poet at the

same time is able to capitalise on his subservience, by becoming analogous to Nature, and

making the freedom which he imitates from Nature his own.

Kant's solution to Plato's paradox of mimesis provides the matrix for a certain

Romantic concept of the subject, in which the subject's derivativeness in relation to the past,

like Kant's poet's relationship to Nature, is reappropriated by that subject. This gesture

extends from Schiller's On the naïve and the sentimental in literature to Bloom's Anxiety.

Furthermore, Kant's account, although it suggests that the poet is Nature's beloved or favorite,

marginalises and makes inessential the concept of love which was at the center of Plato's

Phaedrus. It was that concept of love which in Plato disrupted the commerce between the

human and the divine and divided the subject. Kant however presents both as unproblematic;

his remastering of the subject necessarily involves the exclusion of love from his system, and

presupposes a subject incapable of the concept of love (as gift, as absolute passivity) which is

at the heart of Plato's Phaedrus.

It is on this concept of the subject that Kant's aestheticisation of Plato's concept of

mimesis depends. Despite his formal reservations regarding the inaccessibility of the

supersensual, Kant never problematises the function of the work of art as sensual

representation of the supersensual. That is not to say that Kant is not complicated. Rather, the

complication - which arises from Kant's minute and methodical division of the aesthetic

process into a series of stages, each seamlessly leading to the next - actually prevents the

tragic failure constituted in Plato by the absence of the supersensual. Where the subject and

aesthetics in Plato are confronted with and divided by the aporia of mimesis, Kant's

resolution of that paradox, in such a manner as to preserve the subject in the face of its
 447

imitation of Nature, is accompanied by an aesthetic free of genuine paradox (which are

different from his antinomies). Kant inaugurates the German tradition's re-reading of Plato by

mastering that in Plato which interrogated the aesthetic and the subject.1

At the same time as he deproblematises mimesis, however, Kant devalorises it to a

greater degree even than Plato. Representation (of the supersensual by the sensual) becomes

only one moment in a finite process, ordered and predetermined by the rational determination

of the supersensual; the symbol leads beyond itself to an unlimited infinite in which it is

erased. Kant's suspicion of mimesis is seen most clearly in the fact that his aesthetic is

defined and delimited by a concept of the disgusting, as something which cannot be

represented. The lowest point (the disgusting) and the highest point (the sublime) of his

aesthetic are non-representational. Kant thus delimits in his text both kinds of mimesis which

this thesis has examined: the mimesis of the supersensual by the sensual symbol, and the

mimesis of Nature by the poet. As we argued in our introduction, this suspicion of

representation corresponds to a tradition of reading which Kant inaugurates in the domain of

philosophy but which was inspired by Luther and the Reformation. It is this which gives

Kant's re-reading its fundamental originality. Kant also for the first time makes explicit and

systematises the concept of a poet based on Plato's lover. The theories of mimesis which we

presented as developing from Kant's inherit that concept of the poet, but at the same time

reintroduced into it the interrogation of the subject of aesthetics which Kant excised from

Plato's text.

1This concept of inspiration, in which the poet re-asserts himself against all odds (Nature) can be

interpreted (by Bloom for example) as a heroic act. Timothy Clark criticises a similar concept of

inspiration in 'Orientations towards a Theory of Inspiration (with Shelley as a Closing Example)' 87.

The Critical Review (New South Wales) 34 (1994). 85-112. The concept of inspiration which we

oppose to this one, althought it describes inspiration as a tragic event, does not describe the person who

experiences it as a tragic hero; quite the reverse in fact.

 448

Valéry addresses (Kant's) aesthetics by refusing the model of interaction between the

poet and his source of inspiration which Kant uses to re-assert the mastery of the subject. He,

and the Symbolist tradition to which he belongs, aspire to a world of pure form, in which

poetry would be completely non-representational and unrelated to the real world. This

otherworldly poetry is necessarily underwritten by a logic of inspiration. Valéry at the same

time rejects the heteronomy which characterises inspiration in order to assert the role of the

poet's intelligence in the creative process. The antinomy between these two positions was

addressed in Kant by presenting the poet as remastering the heteronomy of inspiration on his

own behalf. The more inspired and imitative of Nature he is, the more freely creative he is.

Valéry's poet refuses such a mastery while underlining its necessity, and deconstructs Kant's

aesthetic by forcing the poet to confront the agon of the creating subject (which was latent in

but passed over in silence by Plato's concept of inspiration).

Valéry's poet is, like Plato's, a tragic lover. The confrontation with the aporia of

inspiration is represented in Valéry's description of Adonis, the beloved who is wounded by

the absence of his lover, and fatally wounded by a Boar during the hunt. Rather than enjoy a

successful division of labor with his source of inspiration, Valéry's poet experiences the

process of creation as tragic suffering in which he is divided as a subject. Valéry remains

close to Kant however in his suspicion of mimesis. The imitation of music, which he opposes

to mimesis, functions according to the very Kantian model of imitation which Valéry

deconstructs in his discussion of inspiration. Valéry's assertion of the importance of

intelligence and of the superiority of poetry over music therefore undermines the (Kantian)

aesthetic on which his condemnation of mimesis is based. By taking aesthetics to its formalist

breaking-point, he opens the way for a revaluation of mimesis.

 449

Eliot's poetics, particularly in his reading of Dante, seem to return to an entirely

aesthetic iconography, in which poetry enjoys a restricted degree of freedom vis-à-vis the

demands of realism, appeals to the feelings but is connected to the intellect, and symbolises

the divine in the sensual. What demarcates this concept of poetry - which Eliot shares with

Plato - from aesthetics, is the interrogation of the subject which is carried out most insistently

by Valéry. Eliot's concept of poetic creation as impersonal corresponds to a systematic

critique of the metaphysical subject. This critique is based on his concept of tradition, which

depends on the paradox of mimesis, and argues that for the poet to be original he must repeat

tradition, and that to be traditional he must repeat tradition originally. Eliot therefore

confronts squarely Plato's aporia of active/passivity; his poet, in order to be traditional, must

be the active/passive mimetic poet inspired by divine love which Plato circumvents. Eliot's

return to the aesthetic concept of imitation is made from the vantage point of the

deconstruction of the subject of aesthetics (and therefore of aesthetics itself), whose

development is charted by this thesis. His critique of personality, which is generalised beyond

literature to his political and philosophical writing, responds to an imperative which reaches

him from Plato via Valéry. His definition of literature's specificity corresponds to the mimetic

imperative of proper impropriety; like Plato, he argues that the proper of literature is to be

improper, but because of his confrontation with the aporia of subjectivity (through Valéry), is

able to value that impropriety.

2.

However, as we have been hinting throughout this thesis, the rule of impropriety which we

have been considering, like the rule of mimesis of which it is one 'representation', underlies

the discourse of philosophy as well as literature. Philosophy to must entertain a mimetic

relationship to the texts it reads, in which it allows those texts to be imitated in their alterity.

In other words, the concept of mimesis which we have developed throughout this thesis is not
 450

particular to literature, but common to all language; so too, the concept of inspiration as the

advention of the other which interrupts the economy of the subject is the condition of all

language. Language could not function if it were not for the inspiration with which the

theories of mimesis discussed by this thesis define literature. This responds to an ambiguity

in the Derridean concept of the gift. At the same time as Derrida describes the gift as an

impossible ideal, he also demonstrates that exchange would be impossible without it, and that

any use of language would be impossible to imagine without the gift. The first concept of the

gift, as an impossible ideal, makes it possible to define the gift as particular to literature. The

second concept of the gift, as underlying all exchange and all uses of language, implies by

contrast that the gift cannot be considered as a particular characteristic of literature.

This ambiguity results from the fact that the metaphysical concept of the subject

(which cannot give, which is not affected by the iterable mark) has a certain limited

usefulness and even efficacy. It is possible up to a point to understand the world with that

concept; even if that understanding is limited and self-contradictory, it still functions within

certain parameters. People are able to use language even if their understanding of language

does not explain how that use is possible. Metaphysics in other words is blind to the

conditions of its own possibility, but that does not prevent it from acting and thinking. The

deconstruction of the subject, by contrast, is a more complicated operation than the

metaphysics of the subject, and is so by definition, because it must take account of the aporia

which that metaphysics ignores; it distinguishes itself from metaphysics by taking into

account the conditions according to which what is attempted by that metaphysics is possible.

This returns us to the different responses to the paradox which we discussed in our

introduction. Metaphysics is governed by paradoxes, while acting as if those paradoxes were

resolved. Deconstruction must confront those paradoxes in their paradoxicality. Thus, one

might say, although the gift underlies all exchange, the impossible ideal of the gift consists in

the first place in being aware of that fact, rather than being blind to it.
 451

But mere awareness cannot distinguish deconstruction from metaphysics, since

metaphysics is aware of the paradox it refuses to confront (hence its productive blindness and

insight), and can piously observe that paradox and then act as it would if there were none.

The only way that deconstruction can distinguish itself from metaphysics is through its

confrontation with the paradox. This entails not an awareness, but a response, in other words

a different manner of reading, and of behaving (a different epistemology and a different

ethics). To return to the example of the gift, all actions are made possible by the gift, whether

the subject of those actions is able to conceptualise the gift or not. But a recognition of the

principle of the gift which makes all exchange possible is only possible on condition that it be

acted upon. The (heuristic) formulations 'recognised' and 'acted upon' are unsatisfactory,

because they imply that a recognition precedes an act, that the general principle of the gift is

recognised before being applied or put into practice.2 The recognition of the gift is, however,

just the very (impossible) act of giving to which it summons. The gift makes possible the

exchange which is not a gift, and the subject who is incapable of giving; it makes possible the

ideology which negates it. Insofar, the gift is unavoidable. To go beyond that ideology

however is to respond to the paradoxical imperative of the gift. Insofar, the gift is an

impossible duty.

We will now return to the discussion of the particularity of literature in relation to

impropriety and the gift, and argue that the theories of mimesis which address those

paradoxes define literature as a particular response to them. Even though impropriety and the

gift are the conditions of everything, a recognition of this fact necessarily implies that our

understanding of literature must respond to those paradoxes. The theories of mimesis

examined in this thesis all attempt to formulate literature's particular response to those

2I refer once again to Geoff Bennington. 'X.' Applying: To Derrida. Eds. John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins

and Julian Wolfreys. London: Macmillan, 1996. 1-20.

 452

summons. This leads us to another confrontation with Heidegger. Heidegger's polemic

against the aesthetic criticises it for defining literature in a manner which is programmed by

philosophy. To this he opposes a concept of Dichtung, which allows Being to reveal itself in

unconcealedness, at the same time as it (Being) is in retreat. But the object of Heidegger's

philosophy is just this authentic relationship to Being. Tentatively, we may suggest that

Dichtung accomplishes the project of philosophy in Heidegger. This thesis suspects that just

as Heidegger's attempt to reduce the subject to nothing in the advent of Being makes possible

the apotheosis of the subject, so too his critique of aesthetics in favor of a Dichtung which

makes possible an authentic relationship to Being results in the apotheosis of aesthetics.

But what of deconstruction? Is deconstruction able to countenance the specificity of

discourses, even though the deconstructive reading of aesthetics which we have attempted

implies that all discourses are made possible by what we describe as the characteristics of a

particular discourse (literature); for example, Derrida suggests in 'Che cos'è la poesia?' that

literature is defined by the very passivity which he defines elsewhere as the condition of all

language). This thesis concludes that literature must be defined as a particular response to the

imperative of mimesis, which also underlies all discourse. What constitutes that specific

response is, I would like to suggest, representation, as defined by aesthetics, but uprooted

from the metaphysics of the subject. The specificity of literature is a kind of mimesis, but one

which responds to the paradoxical imperatives which are denied by the metaphysics of the

subject.

This amounts to confronting Heidegger one last time, and opposing his opposition to

mimesis; it amounts to asserting a non-aesthetic mimesis against his ultimately aesthetic

condemnation of it. Deconstruction has been divided on this issue. Although 'Che cos'è la

poesia?' points the way toward a re-affirmation of the role of mimesis such as we are

attempting, deconstruction (as we saw with Lacoue-Labarthe), tends to come down on the
 453

side of a concept of literature as sublime and non-representational, and as saying the

unsayable.3 We intimated in our introduction that Heidegger's iconophobia is tied to his

Reformist opposition to the Latin and Catholic tradition. His reading of Plato thus

emphasises Plato's opposition to mimesis without touching on his praise of the icon in the

Phaedrus. Heidegger, in other words, replaces the Latin filter with a Heideggerian/Lutheran

one. Now, the most important philosophical tradition for deconstruction's enterprise is the

very German tradition which begins with Kant and ends with Heidegger. That Lutheran

tradition of Greek scholarship, as we argued in our introduction, is responsible for a reading

of the Greeks which makes deconstruction possible, but which is also responsible for

3Cf. 'My "first" inclination wasn't really towards philosophy, but rather towards literature, no, towards

something that literature accomodates more easily than philosophy. I feel as if I've been involved, for

twenty years, in a long detour in order to get back to this something, this idiomatic writing whose purity

I know to be inaccesible, but which I continue, nonetheless, to dream about. [Interviewer]: What do you

mean by "idiomatic"? J.D.: A property you cannot appropriate; it somehow marks you without

belonging to you. It appears only to others, never to you - except in flashes of madness which draw

together life and death, which render you at once alive and dead' ('Interview with Derrida' (1983) 111.

Trans. David Allison. Derrida and Différance. Eds. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi. Coventry:

Parousia Press, 1985. 107-127; my emphasis). Compare: 'Socrates considered [the tragic art] among the

flattering arts which portray only the agreeable, not the useful; and therefore he required of his disciples

abstinence and strict separation from such unphilosophical attractions - with such success that the

youthful tragic poet Plato first burned his poems that he might become a student of Socrates. […]

Plato's main objection to the older art [tragedy] - that it is the imitation of a phantom and hence belongs

to a sphere even lower than the empirical world - could certainly not be directed against the new art [the

Platonic dialogue]; and so we find Plato endeavoring to transcend reality and to represent the idea

which underlies pseudo-reality. Thus Plato, the thinker, arrived by a detour where he had always been

at home as a poet - at the point from which Sophocles and the older arts protested solemnly against the

objection' (Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy § 14, 90; my emphasis).

 454

marginalising the icon and mimesis. It is not surprising therefore to find Heidegger's critique

of the Latin filter echoed in deconstruction.4

What I would like to offer in conclusion is a reading which removes the Lutheran

filter from Plato's mimesis, to offer a Catholic (iconophilic, traditional) deconstruction. That

deconstruction is one which values literature as an iconography, but as an iconography which

insists on the grafia. In other words, the function of the icon as sensual, as inspirational, as

the play of form, would all be understood as responding to the paradoxical necessity of being

governed by the absolutely other, rather than by the programme of the subject of aesthetics.

The necessity toward which this thesis points is essentially that of understanding Plato's

concept of divine love with the deconstructive concept of writing. This necessity has been

dictated by our reading of a series of writers and concepts, each of which is formulated as the

reading of another concept, which it repeats and goes beyond at the same time (mimesis). It is

according to this logic that I argued that Eliot in some sense repeats Plato's concept of divine

love, and anticipates Derrida's concept of the other. I would therefore like to end by citing

Eliot en abyme. Here, he alludes to Dante's idea of love at the same time as he sees Dante as

going beyond Virgil, and as the model by imitating whom Eliot himself becomes original:

But he [Virgil] was denied the vision of the man who could say:

'Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the

scattered leaves of all the universe.'

Legato con amor in un volume.5

4Cf. Derrida. 'Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la "religion" aux limites de la simple raison.' La

Religion. Eds. J. Derrida and Gianni Vattimo. Paris: Seuil, 1996.

5'Virgil and the Christian World' (1951) 131. On Poetry and Poets. 121-131.
 455

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