1. University of Oregon
The Performative Basis of Modern Literary Theory
Author(s): Henry McDonald
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Winter, 2003), pp. 57-77
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2. HENRY McDONALD
The Performative Basis of
Modern Literary Theory
T HE TERM PERFORMATIVEis undoubtedly among the more complex and
ambiguous in the vocabulary of modern literary theory. It was coined by
J.L. Austin in the 1960s to convey language's ability not just to communicate
information but also to bring about or effect actions-from marrying and prom-
ising to christening and declaring war-in accordance with social conventions.'
In the wake of the John Searle-Jacques Derrida debate of the late seventies and
early eighties, however, the term acquired a very different connotation: that lan-
guage "performs;' but is not a form of action in any usual sense, because the
performance may always negate itself by failing to convey its intended meaning.
Such uncertainty of meaning is illustrated by literary productions in which the
results effected by the writer may be contrary to, or at least at some remove from,
his or her purposes. Whereas Austin and Searle had defined performative utter-
ances as rule-governed speech acts grounded in the social circumstances and
intentional processes of the agent, the dominant connotation of the term that
emerged from the Searle-Derrida debate-a debate that most literary critics
thought Derrida had "won"-was that of autonomous, self-referential "text acts'
whose occurrence was decidedly non-rule-governed. As Martin Heidegger, often
acknowledged by Derrida to be his most important philosophical influence, put
it, "wedo not speak language"; rather, "language speaks us"by fashioning mean-
ings that we can sensitize and attune ourselves to but never fully determine or
are
control. Derridean deconstruction and Heideggerian "destruction" philosophi-
cal practices intended to heighten our attunement to language in the latter sense.
Both valorize language as an ungrounded mode of being.2
1In the second half of How toDo
ThzngsWzthWords, "performative"is displaced by the term "illocu-
tionary" (also coined by Austin), just as the earlier "constative"is displaced by "locutionary" Searle
adopts the term "illocutionary" and, except in Expresszon Meanzng,infrequently uses "performa-
and
tive" In SpeechActs, Searle makes clear his dissatisfaction with the latter term: "Austin'soriginal in-
sight into performatives was that some utterances were not sayings, but doings of some other kind.
But this point can be exaggerated" (68). It is not sentences that "act:'Searle maintains repeatedly,
but people; language "performs"only to the degree that it is the product of an intentional act (29).
2 In The BaszcProblems Phenomenology,
of Heidegger says, "It can be shown historically that at bot-
tom all the great philosophies since antiquity more or less explicitly took themselves to be, and as
such sought to be, ontology" (12). As for Derrida, the Western tradition is repeatedly characterized
in terms of the pervasive influence of a "metaphysics of presence": "I do not believe that a single
counterexample can be found in the entire history of philosophy" ("Signature"3).

3. COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
/58
In this essay, I trace some of the historical and philosophical forces that under-
lie this valorization. I begin with an historical and philosophical overview of the
concept of "performative"language, comparing it with "allegorical" and "sym-
bolic" languages as a means of bringing out some of the richness and complexity
of the former's meaning. I then argue that the key feature of modern literary
theory's valorization of language is that it subverts the "metaphysical"role tradi-
tionally given language as a reflection or mimesis of reality, substituting in its
place an "ontological"role of language as an ungrounded mode of being. Finally,
I maintain that the engine of such ontologization is modern aesthetics and its
anti-mimetic, anti-didactic, and language-based account of art. My effort through-
out is to show that the rise of modern aesthetics gains a greater philosophical
coherence when it is viewed against the backdrop of a radically new idea of "real-
ity;'one which did something classical metaphysics, the metaphysics of presence,
had never done: it invested languagewith ontological significance.
I.
The demise of speech act theory as an active influence in literary studies in
this country after the Searle-Derrida debate was coincident, roughly, with the
rise of poststructuralism and postmodernism.3 Indeed, it constituted one of the
many factors that set the agenda for literary theory in the following decades. In
order to gain a broader perspective on these issues, we need to "rotate" theo-
the
retical orientation of literary criticism in a direction away from the dispute be-
tween analytic and continental traditions over whether language is referentially
grounded or not, and toward what I will characterize as a much more basic dis-
juncture between "pre-modern"and "modern"perspectives.
From such a vantage point the term "performative"has a radical and at the
same time subtle ambiguity. On the one hand, language is "performative"in the
sense that it participates in and resembles sensuously the reality it represents.
"Language" is understood not as a set of conventional or arbitrary meanings
imposed by us, but as what the seventeenth-century Lutheran thinker Jakob
Boehme called a Naturspracheor "language of in which the essences or
nature,'
natures of things impose themselves on us.4 In pre-modern allegorical narrative,
for example, language is taken to be a reflection or manifestation of some extra-
linguistic reality that functions mimetically and didactically. "Presence"signifies
in this instance not an experience reducible empirically to a private act of con-
sciousness, or "idea"but a social and public experience, one version of which
can be found in the following passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet
Two especially valuable essays that acknowledge the declining influence of speech act theory in
literary studies areJacqueline Henkel's "Speech-Act Theory Revisited" and Mary Louise Pratt's "Ide-
ology and Speech-Act Theory."
4 On Boehme's pervasive influence on romanticism through his notion of an "Adamic"language,
see Aarsleff, Language and IntellectualHzstory59, 60, 65, 84, 87, 97 n13, 317; Study of Language 154;
"Rise and Decline" 282-84; and Beck 147-56, 381. On Boehme's influence on Schelling, see Aarsleff,
Language and Intellectual140-42, 144; and Bowie 3, 117, 178. On Boehme's influence on Coleridge,
see Holmes, Early Vzszons 120, 365; DarkerReflectzons 207, 250, 399. On his influence on Emerson,
53,
see Richardson 23-27, 221, 228.

4. THE PERFORMATIVE
BASIS/59
Letter.Speaking of the seventeenth-century Puritans in New England, the narra-
tor remarks:
Nothing was more common, in those days,than to interpretall meteoric appearances,and other
naturalphenomena, that occurredwith less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so
many revelationsfrom a supernatural source.Thus, a blazingspear,a swordof flame, a bow,or a
sheaf of arrows,seen in the midnightsky,prefiguredIndianwarfare.Pestilencewasknownto have
been forebodedby a showerof crimsonlight.Wedoubtwhetheranymarkedevent,for good or evil,
everbefell New England,from its settlementdownto Revolutionary times,of whichthe inhabitants
had not been previously warnedby some spectacleof this nature.Not seldom, it had been seen by
multitudes... It was, indeed, a majesticidea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed,in
these awfulhieroglypics, the cope of heaven. (1389-90)
on
In this passage, language is viewed as an act of nature, like a meteor shower or
a picture. As for Augustine and most pre-eighteenth century theorists, language
does not "represent" a reality that may be accounted for empirically by its ap-
pearance within "the mind's presence-room"' as John Locke put it (60). Rather,
language emanates or manifests the presencing of a reality, or essence, of which
it is a part.5
The term "allegory"comes from the Greek allos, meaning "other," combined
with agoreuein,meaning "speakopenly;' thus implying that there are two levels of
meaning, often termed the "figurative" and the "literal;'in any allegory (Fletcher
2; Bahti 8). Nonetheless, we must distinguish between different kinds of dualism:
between a relative or constrained dualism that presupposes a larger, unifying "pres-
ence" that links the terms of the duality; and a radical or binary dualism that
presupposes only two independent entities that, precisely because they have no
intermediate or "middle"terms-no unifying context by which one could com-
pare and order them-can simultaneously be separated from and merged with
one another in dialectical fashion.
Defined in this way, the "dualism" allegory is clearly non-dialectical or rela-
of
tive; it is constrained by being subordinated to a larger encompassing unity or
"presence''In William Empson's words, "Partof the function of an allegory is to
make you feel that two levels of being correspond to each other in detail and
indeed that there is some underlying reality, something in the nature of things,
which makes this happen. Either level may illuminate the other... so that it is
not even obvious which is tenor and which is vehicle" (346). Although the unify-
ing context of allegory cannot exhaustivelybe specified, it can always be speci-
fied in part; it is always in processof being illuminated, a feature that explains why
allegory has typically been written in narrative form. Thus, allegorical exegesis,
or allegoresis, often functions, in Peter Szondi's words, "to annul the distance
between reader and author" by drawing "the canonical text ... out of its histori-
cal remoteness into the present, to make it not only comprehensible but also, as
it were, present" (6). By the time of the classical age of the Athenians and the
later Alexandrians, for example, Homer's language was no longer immediately
comprehensible; the allegoresis of the Stoics bridged this gap by claiming that
5Qtd. in Vance, "Saint Augustine" 251, 22. "Augustinedoes speakof things and of signs in [On
Dialectics]. . . but he does not take the former to be referentsof the latter.The world is divided
into signsand thingsaccordingto whetherthe perceivedobjectivehas transitive valueor not. Things
participate in signs as sigmnfiers, as referents" (Todorov 40; see also 15-16, 35-59).
not

5. LITERATURE
COMPARATIVE /60
contemporary ideas had been prefigured in allegorical disguise by Homer, just
as later generations during the Middle Ages refigured Virgil's Aeneid as an alle-
gory of the human soul from birth to death. Similarly, the typological inter-
pretation of the Bible bridged the historical distance between Old and
New Testaments by interpreting them in terms of the relation of promise and
fulfillment (Szondi 6-11, 110). During the seventeenth century, as Sacvan
Bercovitch has argued, American Puritans radicalized the tradition of Biblical
typology by applying such an allegory of promise and fulfillment to their own
contemporary history.6
In allegory, the temporal or "horizontal"dimension is subordinate to its '"erti-
cal"dimension, whose scale, or degrees of difference, is ideally fixed:
Allegorical dualism.., .is the natural result of the cosmic function of allegory, inasmuch as
cosmologies of times earlier than our own depended on a "chain of being"' in which, if one de-
scended just a step lower than the lowest stage one could imagine, one reached a sort of absolute
zero, Lucifer upturned in the pit of Hell, while his counterpart, Jehovah, stood at an absolute height
of divine power and good. (Fletcher 223-24)
What is reflected, then, in the mode of allegory is a pre-modern confidence
that the "mind"can grasp the "reality" represented in art, even if that grasp will
always be limited. It follows that the functions of allegory, as well as those of
other pre-modern literary and artistic forms, can be properly didactic; art, like
rhetoric, may "teach lessons" about life, including ethical and political ones
(Fletcher 121).
If we turn now to the term symbolic, find not just that the meaning of the
we
latter is intimately bound to the meaning of allegory, but that it is bound to a
particular-and, from a pre-modern perspective, impoverished-understanding
of allegory ushered in by Martin Luther during the Reformation and culminat-
ing in the work of Coleridge in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, it is only
possible to understand the mode of allegory as "performative"in a distinctively
"pre-modern"sense if one distances oneself from Coleridge's influential account.
That account, shaped by Schelling and the Schlegels, associates allegory with the
Kantian category of the Understanding, in which a concept, or "pre-determined
form" is impressed "mechanically" on the "material" of experience. In A.W.
Schlegel's words,
The form is mechanical when through outside influence it is imparted to a material merely as an
accidental addition, without relation to its nature (as e.g. when we give an arbitrary shape to a soft
mass so that it may retain it after hardening). Organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it unfolds
itself from within and acquires its definiteness simultaneously with the total development of the
germ. (qtd. in Wellek, TheRomantzcAge48)
Whereas "Allegoryis but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language
which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses"' symbol-
ism is associated with the higher Kantian power of Reason. Its form is not pre-
determined but "organic": shapes, as it develops, itself from within... It always
"it
partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the
whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative
6 See Bercovitch, Americanxiv, 4-10, 24-26, 125-60; Puritan 114-18; and Miller 29-31, 34-39, 133-
40, 173-85, 192-204, 305-15,460-63, 482-85.

6. THE PERFORMATIVE
BASIS/61
... Symbol is a sign included in the idea, which it represents" (Coleridge, On
Language 40; Statesman's Manual 230).
This account, however, scarcely does justice to the pre-modern understanding
of allegory; in order to grant the symbol a higher organic unity and ontological
status, it attributes to allegory a rigid dualism.' Whereas traditional allegoresis
assumed that one and the same truth could be understood in two different ways
-philosophically and theologically, for example-the new mode of textual in-
terpretation ushered in by Luther and the Reformation claimed, in Frederick
Beiser's words, "not that they are different kinds of discourse about the same
subject matter, but that they are different kinds of discourse about different sub-
ject matters" (27). The two "different subject matters" that Beiser refers to here
correspond to Augustine's "kingdom of heaven" and "kingdom of earth,' except
that the polarity between the two has been sharpened, by Luther, so as to consti-
tute a "double-truth Such a doctrine entailed an "ontological distinc-
doctrine'.'
tion concerning different kinds of existence or realms of being" (25) that effected
a radical dualism between reason and faith:
All that we can infer about God from our natural reason, [Luther and Calvin] argue, is that he
exists. We cannot have an adequate knowledge, however, of how he exists, of his essence or nature.
Luther undercuts the main premise behind natural theology by denying that it is possible for rea-
son to know the final and efficient causes of things. (31)
It is its hierarchical, cosmological framework that allows allegory, in contrast
to modern "symbolism,'to serve didactic functions and convey its ideas directly,
as opposed to the "indirections" of symbolism. Goethe's formulation of the dif-
ference between the two, which, according to Rene Wellek and Tzvetan Todorov,
was the main source for the development of the opposition between allegory
and symbol in German romantics and Coleridge, brings this point out: "The
allegorical differs from the symbolic in that what the latter designates indirectly,
the former designates directly."8
Although it was Goethe who introduced the opposition between allegory and
symbol, it was Kant who in the Critique ofJudgmentinitiated a dramatic change in
the meaning of the word symbol. According to Todorov,
Until 1790, the word "symbol"had a very different meaning from the one it was to acquire in the
romantic era. Either it was simply synonymous with a series of other, more commonly used terms
such as allegory, hieroglyph, figure (in the sense of number), emblem, and so on, or else it desig-
nated primarily the purely arbitrary and abstract sign (mathematical symbols) ... Far from charac-
terizing abstract reason, the symbol belongs to the intuitive and sense-based manner of apprehending
things. (199-200)
Kant himself showed awareness of the change he was helping to initiate when in
the CritiqueofJudgmenthe remarked that "logicians"are "wrong ... to contrast
symbolic with intuitive presentation, [for] symbolic presentation is only a kind of
intuitive presentation" (227). As discussed in more detail below, a very similar
kind of change of meaning was initiated by Alexander Baumgarten in the usage
of the term "aesthetic"in the early eighteenth century. The two changes were,
7For a discussion of the way in which modern commentaries have oversimplified traditional alle-
gory, see Fletcher 103-35.
8Wellek, The LaterEzghteenthCentury211; Todorov 200; Goethe 314, 1112, 1113. The final sen-
tence in the passage of Goethe is from On the Objects
ofthe PlastzcArts(qtd. in Todorov 199).

7. COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
/62
indeed, interdependent, for both conferred on the sensuous features of artistic
representation an autonomy and epistemological legitimacy or seriousness that
they had lacked prior to the eighteenth century. Both, that is, were reflections of
a more general change in which the ontological status of art was enhanced. Rather
than being relegated to a subordinate sphere by virtue of its sensuous, particular-
ized content-a content that traditional metaphysics had alwaysregarded as hav-
ing an intrinsically deficient cognitive status-art gained a new and enhanced
ontological dignity as a unique, dialectically grounded form of experience in
which what was formerly seen as a deficiency could be transformed into a virtue.
The engine or life of art came to be viewed as a dialectical process in which the
particular was universalized, the sensous spiritualized-in which the art work
carried within it what Hegel called "the sensuous representation of the absolute
itself" (IntroductoryLectures 76).
The new opposition between allegory and symbol served as one of the impor-
tant vehicles of this ontological enhancement, or separation between metaphys-
ics and ontology. Whereas allegory, as A.W. Schlegel said, was merely "the
personification of a concept, a fiction contrived only for this purpose, [symbol-
ism] is what the imagination has created for other reasons, or what possesses a
reality independent of concepts" (qtd. in Wellek, RomanticAge 299). All genuine
art, according to Karl Solger, is symbolic, for it unites essence and existence:
"The symbol is the existence of the Idea itself. It is really what it signifies. It is the
Idea in its immediate reality. The symbolic is thus alwaystrue in itself: not a mere
copy of something true" (qtd. in Wellek, RomanticAge 42).
The "truth"of the symbolic is ultimately a function of the reflective capacities
of the mind. Its sources, if not exactly "within"consciousness, are in some sense
Besonnenheit) us? For Locke and Condillac,
within us, are a "reflection"(reflexion, of
Butler and Coleridge, "reflection"could be used, asJohn Beer puts it, "both as an
abstract word to describe a mental process and as an image invoking metaphors
of religious and moral illumination" (lxxxix). It is by virtue of the reflective ca-
pacities of the mind that humankind, according to Kant, is given access to "the
sublime" For crucial to the experience of sublimity is that "infinitude"which is
glimpsed above all in poetry and art:
Beautyis the symbolicrepresentationof the infinite.., .the oracularverdict of the heart, these
deep intuitionsin which the darkriddle of our existence seems to solveitself.., the powerof infin-
ity itself, and the pursuit of the infinite, is properly natural to man, and a part of his very
essence ... the longing for the infiniteis ... one of the greatarteriesof true poetryand art.'0
From a modern perspective language is "performative"in a sense that can only
be understood with reference to modern symbolism; it is autonomous and "stages,
so to speak, its own reality or acts of consciousness. Language, that is, does not
participate in or resemble a reality external to it. Rather, the meanings of words
are a function of the relations of arbitrary signifiers that, lacking positive values,
are never, as such, "present." The reality that language exhibits or "performs"is
in
9 Rousseau 13. For further discussion of the importance of the term reflectzon eighteenth-century
thought, see Aarsleff, Locke29, 107-9, 128-29, 155,163-64, 341-42, 350.
'o The first part of the quotation is from A.W. Schlegel, qtd. in Wellek, RomantzcAge 43. The
second part is from his brother Friedrich's Phzlosophy Lzfe 429, 426.
of

8. THE PERFORMATIVE
BASIS/63
not a "presence"but an absence or non-presence; it is an imaginative capacity or
potentiality of inwardness related to what the Germans call Bildung (inner cul-
ture), and which, although "within" cannot be controlled or mastered byus."
us,
In the words of Edgar Allan Poe, whose critiques of allegory anticipated modern
symbolism, and whose works brilliantly incarnate that nihilistic marriage of skep-
ticism and romanticism diagnosed by Nietzsche, it is "some exciting knowledge
-some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction'.2 Or, in
Heidegger's words in On the Wayto Language, "the essential nature of language
flatly refuses to express itself in words-in the language, that is, in which we
make statements about language. If language everywhere withholds its nature in
this sense, then such withholding is in the very nature of language" (81). Such an
understanding of language as negatively, or "intransitively," performative informs
Derrida's notion of ecriture. he says in Writingand Difference,
As "The pure book,
the book itself.., must be the 'book about nothing' that Flaubert dreamed of
... This emptiness as the situation of literature must be acknowledged by the
critic as that which constitutes the specificity of his object, around which he al-
ways speaks" (8, 108). Language must "twistits tongue to speak the non-linguistic
conditions of language" (Derrida, "Me-Psychoanalysis" 10). Timothy Clark sums
up the common features of Heidegger and Derrida's philosophical perspectives
as follows:
Languagecannot.., .become the object of any representationalist meta-language. This transcen-
dental force of language can only be approached..,.by way of a mode of language that tries to
sayingof saying,
hearkenor resonateto its own sourcesor genesis. It must become an intransitive
whatever extraordinary
the innovationsthis demandrequires.(149)
stylistic
II.
What is at issue in the radically different modern and pre-modern accounts of
language as performative are the ultimate sources from which language gains mean-
ing. Pre-modern accounts-associated with a metaphysics ofpresence-posit those
sources as beyond human experience yet comprehensible; the meanings that
"the language of nature" conveys exist prior to our reception of them and are
imposed on us. Modern accounts-associated with an ontologyof reflection-by
contrast posit that those sources are a function of human consciousness, yet are
not comprehensible in strictly rational terms. Metaphysics an ancient term that
is
carries Aristotelian and neo-Platonic connotations of a "chainof being'.'Ontology,
on the other hand, is a modern term that was coined in the seventeenth century
by an obscure Calvinist philosopher, and that became widely used during the
eighteenth century by the Leibnizian philosophers Christian Wolff and Alexander
" See Bruford for a discussion of the German concept of Bzldungfrom Wilhelm von Humboldt to
Thomas Mann.
12The
quotation is from Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle" (Poetry and Tales 198). Speaking of the
influence of romanticism on modern criticism, Rene Wellek remarks, "much is not drawn directly
from the original sources but rather comes through many intermediaries, through Coleridge, Poe,
the French symbolists, and Croce" (LaterEzghteenth Century4). Elsewhere, Wellek also comments,
"Coleridge was the main source..,. not only for a long line of English critics but also for the American
transcendentalists and for Poe, and thus indirectly for the French symbolists" (RomantzcAge 157).

9. LITERATURE
COMPARATIVE /64
Baumgarten; the latter, not incidentally, also helped to establish the modern
usage of the term aesthetics.'" terms Metaphysics
The and ontology thus have roots,
respectively, in the two major currents of our western heritage, the Greco-Roman
and Judaeo-Christian. These currents, although inextricably linked to one an-
other in innumerable ways, have nonetheless been engaged, as Nietzsche put it,
"in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years" (488). Classical metaphys-
ics may be distinguished from modern ontology by the former's lack of a distinct
concept of "existence"as radically contingent (see Kahn; Seligman 18, and Gilson
119). Usually set in opposition to the Aristotelian and more rationalistic concept
of the notion of existence has its sources in the distinctively Christian
"essence,'
account of creation ex nihilo. It was given special emphasis by Martin Luther dur-
ing the Reformation and gained currency in modern times through the work
of Soren Kierkegaard, which influenced Heidegger and other existentialist
thinkers.!4 By providing a counter-concept to "presence" it has also influenced,
less directly, poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers (see Derrida, "Post-
Scriptum," "Faith,"and "How to Avoid").
As I will use the terms in this essay, then, metaphysics inherits the rationalistic
emphasis placed on being by classical culture; it seeks the whatnessor essences of
things (ousia, essentia), such "essences"forming a conceptually comprehensible,
eternally self-generating, hierarchy or chain of being in which the human es-
sence occupies one, but not the highest, level. Ontology, the other hand, signi-
on
fies not metaphysics, but what Kant calls a "metaphysics of metaphysics" (my
emphasis). It inherits the sense of radical contingency placed on being by Chris-
tian-especially Lutheran-theology, seeking the thatnessor "existence"of things
(existentia),an existence not comprehensible in human terms but one with which
human beings are uniquely qualified, by virtue of their capacity for language, to
engage. Whereas classical metaphysics declares ex nihilo nihilfit (from nothing,
nothing comes to be), Christian thinkers such as Augustine maintain ex nihilofit
-ens creatum(from nothing comes created being). Pre-Christian metaphysics
asks, "Whatis?"Post-Christian ontology wonders that there is anything at all and
poses the question, originating with Leibniz but taking on its distinctively mod-
ern implications with Hume, Schelling, and Heidegger, "Whyis there something
rather than nothing?"'15
13The obscure Calvinistphilosopherwas, according to Rene Wellek,Rudolf Golclenius (1547-
1628) (American 161). See also Owens35 and MacIntyre
Criticism 542.
14 See Heidegger,Being and Time30; Oberman120-21,274-75;Bambach199-201;Richter10, 88;
and Zimmerman, 19.
Eclzpse
15 Heidegger,Kant andtheProblem Metaphyszcs see chapter4 for discussionof the meaningof
of 28;
Kant's phrase.Leibniz'squestionappearsin "ThePrinciplesof Natureand Grace,Basedon Reason"
[1714]. The sentence followingthe question, "Fornothing is simplerand easier than something"
(Selections clearlyindicatesthe non-ontological,
527), determinedly and
metaphysical, "non-modern"
sense in which Leibnizunderstood the question. See also Heidegger'scomments in "Nihilismas
IV: and
Determinedby the Historyof Being" (Nietzsche 208); Exzstence Bezng to
328-49;Introductzon
Metaphyszcs and Pathmarks 317. See also DavidKrell's
1-42; 289, commentson the importanceof this
issue in Heidegger'sworks:"Study [Heidegger's]later texts disclosesthe lasting qualityof the
of
issue of ground and nullity. Such study makes it impossible to assent to that interpretationof
Heidegger's career which asserts that the problem of the nothing pertains to an 'existentialist'
phase that is soon tranquilized into 'releasement' by 'thankfulness to Being'" (Heidegger Nzetzsche
IV: 284-85). In his Essay on the Orgin of Language, Locke remarks on the metaphysical implications

10. THE PERFORMATIVE
BASIS/65
The latter question is distinctively modern because the mere asking of it throws
us into a "hermeneutic circle" that is not only inescapable but imposes on us
skepticism about "the reality" of what lies outside us; it imposes a view of our-
selves from within as stretched between a dialectical, but at the same time dialec-
tically unresolvable, tension of being and nothingness. That tension subsists on,
and is continuously incited by, the threat of nihilism. Such a threat, as KarlLowith
pointed out (51), could have arisen in radical form only in the context of the
Christian notion of creation ex nihilo, for only those who believe they have been
created out of nothing can be haunted by the contingency that they may become
nothing once again.
For many centuries prior to the modern period a creationist account of the
universe coexisted in apparent harmony with a rationalist and essentialist view of
that same universe as the emanation of eternal categories of being. The fragility
of this harmony was first exposed by the nominalistic philosophy of William of
Ockham (later adopted by Martin Luther):
Whatfourteenth-century Christianspeculationtried to do wasto blowup the solid block of Greco-
Arabicdeterminism,and this wasmainlythe workof the Franciscan School. Ockham,for instance,
wasgoing to do it by simplyannihilatingall essences ... the blockof Greco-Arabicnecessitydisinte-
gratesunder the pressureof twochargesof theologicalexplosive:the absoluteinfinityof the divine
essence and the absolutefreedomof God'swill. (Gilson84-85)
Anticipating in a limited way certain features of modern empiricism, Ockham's
nominalism "annihilated all essences" by insisting that such essences, or univer-
sals, were only the common names we give to individuals among themselves. In
reality, "there are only individuals:'16
Such nominalism thus stripped "the playing
field of reality"by eliminating any intermediate entities, or essences, "between"
God and man-by eliminating everything, that is, except language and thereby
opening up a pathway to the valorization and re-ontologization of language that
was a feature of Christianity from the beginning."
This "nihilation" and elimination entailed, at the level of language, what Stephen
Nichols calls the abandonment of "the literal language of historical time and
place, the univocal language of phenomena, in favor of... the more difficult
and veiled language [of] scripture" (57). By engaging actively in the interpreta-
tion of such difficult and veiled language, the individual reader participated in
what was ultimately the discovery of his own existence. As John Scotus Erigena
of essentiaas follows:"Essence maybe takenfor the being of anythingwherebyit is whatit is. And
thus the real internal,but generally(in Substances)unknown,constitutionof things,whereontheir
discoverable qualitiesdepend, maybe called their essence. This is the properoriginalsignification
of the word,as is evidentfrom the formationof it: essentza, its primarynotation, signifyingprop-
in
erly being"(238). Withintwentieth-century Frenchphilosophy,Bergson,whose workDerridahas
praised, anticipatesthe (ontological) "turn" language. As Vincent Descombes says, "Leibniz's
to
statementof the metaphysical problem [whichis preciselynot metaphysical from mystandpoint]-
whyis there something,ratherthan nothing?-clearly showsthat the metaphysician nothing on
sets
a par with something, or even accords it a certain priority.But in reality,explains Bergson, this
nothing is an effect of language"(25). RobertBernasconiaptly comments that in addressingthe
Questionof Being, "There no 'why',only the 'that'"(8).
is
16The firstpartof the quotationis from Duns Scotus,qtd. in Lovejoy 156;the second partis from
Descartes,qtd.inDoing 289.
17For discussionsof Ockhamand his influence on Germanphilosophy,see Beck, Early78-82,
512-13;and Tillich,Hzstory 183-88, 198-99,206-7.

11. COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
/66
had put it in the ninth century: "The fabric of divine Scripture is intricately woven
and entwined with turns and obliquities. The Holy Spirit did not desire to make
it so because it grudged our understanding, a possibility about which we should
not even think, but because it was eager to exercise our intelligence and to re-
ward hard toil and discovery" (qtd. in Nichols 257). During the sixteenth cen-
tury this model of reading scripture was adopted and intensified. By "releasing
the reader from the constraints of what one might call institutionalized allegory;'
as Terence Cave has argued, "Protestant theories of Scriptural reading trans-
formed the reading of Scripture from a process in which the reader passively
accepted knowledge about what exists to a performative activityin which one par-
ticipated in the discovery of the grounds of one's own existence" (151, 162-63).
Drawing on Ockham'swork, Luther initiated a long history in which, as Norbert
Elias and many others have maintained, Germanic Kultur,with its center in the
written word and private experience, was privileged over French and English
civilization, with its center in speech and courtly rules of conduct.'s The rise of
"writing"' this sense, helped to effect the decline of the Latin "tongue";it also
in
challenged the authority of those languages, Italian and later French, which,
after the Middle Ages, had taken over the functions earlier performed by Latin
(CivilizingProcess42-43; Curtius 25-35, 383-88).
Although the eighteenth century was, ironically, the century in which the con-
cept of the chain of being "attained [its] widest diffusion and acceptance" (Lovejoy
183), it was also the century in which the metaphysical basis of the concept was
undermined and eventually "destroyed"The principal agent of such destruction
was time. For it had alwaysbeen essential to the chain of being that its categories
be fixed, that the whole of reality consist of the same number of individuals sepa-
rated by fixed degrees of difference. Increasingly, especially in the writings of
German romantics and idealists, there was a tendency to substitute the Faustian
ideal of a "strivingfor the unattainable" (Streben nach dem Unendlichen)for the
ideal of the soul at rest in its contemplation of perfection. Such striving is the
complement of a sense of absolute dependence on God that can be found in
German writers from Luther to Schleiermacher: "The common element in all
howsoever diverse expressions of piety . .. is this: the consciousness of being ab-
solutely [schlechthinig] dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in rela-
tion with God" (Schleiermacher 12). Such a sense of absolute dependence is
closely related to Schleiermacher's concept of "the hermeneutic circle": in both
cases one must submit oneself utterly to the Word by enclosing oneself within
the text, suspending all questioning of origins by recognizing, in Heidegger's
words, that "Whatis decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in
the right way" (Being and Time 195). Indeed, since "the world itself came into
existence through the spoken word of God,' the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is
equivalent to the textualization of existence:
The expression "out of nothing" excludes the idea that before the origin of the world anything
existed outside God, which as "matter,"could enter into the formation of the world. And undoubt-
edly the admission of "matter"as existing independently of the divine activity would destroy the
18
Elias, CzvzlzzzngProcess 3-43, 59-61; Germans 123-32, 323-24; and Czvzlzzatzon, Power 49-109. See
also Mennel and Goudsblom 13-24, 36-39.

12. THE PERFORMATIVE
BASIS/67
feeling of absolute dependence ... Our self-consciousness, in its universality.., can only represent
finite being in general so far as it is a continuous being; for we only know ourselves in this manner
but have no consciousness of a beginning of being. (Schleiermacher 153, 148, 146).
Although the pre-modern perspective confers on humankind a certain dis-
tinctiveness, that distinctiveness is achieved by virtue of being torn by conflicting
desires and propensities, of being a member of two orders of being at once, and
therefore not at home in either; it is not a distinctiveness gained by virtue of a fall
from innocence that has conferred on humankind a unique self-knowledge asso-
ciated with an "infinite"capacity of mind!9 In the pre-modern view the capacity
for self-consciousness is a product of, and in no sense a means of transcending,
one's place in the order of the cosmos. Humans are always "'tweened'," occupying
a position between angel and beast in a manner analogous to the Earth'sposition
at the midpoint of the celestial spheres (Aristotle, Physics266 [207a]; Grene 62-
63).Just as the pre-modern view of language as performative dictates that our
systems of representation, or languages, participate in the reality they represent,
so too the metaphysics of presence dictates that the differences between the hu-
man and natural worlds, or between elements within either of the two, be con-
ceived in terms not of binary oppositions but of graded or relative differences
that belong to the same chain or hierarchy of being. However great the "dis-
tance"that might separate "high" from "low" such a chain, their oppositionality
on
is not binary or mutually exclusive, but rather graduated or defined in terms of
the contextual links between them.
In Shakespeare's tragedies, for example, the highmindness, nobility, and purity
of the heroes, who occupy the highest rungs of the social ladder, are posited at
the furthest possible remove from the egotism, sensuality, and slavishness of the
villains, who are implicitly associated with the non-human order of bestiality. Yet
these differences, however great, are only differences of degree, for connecting
the two extremes is a hierarchy, in descending order, of the lower nobility, mer-
chants, peasants, homeless beggars, and slaves. Moreover, the hero's position at
the top of the social/human order is at the same time a position at the bottom of
the celestial one. Social order is not only hierarchical; it is continuous with that
of a yet higher hierarchy (Utterback 271, 278). Thus, there can be no hope for
an "escapefrom necessity" such as Christianity holds out to those who have faith.
That is why the subversion of the social order in classical and Shakespearean
tragedy is usually a sign of a tear in the fabric of the cosmos. But again, disorder,
chaos, and "nothingness" in these tragedies are not set in binary opposition to
order, reason, and fullness of presence. Rather, the former are the "relative ab-
sence, the lack or privation, of the latter; they constitute not a part of "reality"
but what lies "outside"it: a vague and indefinite dimension of unmeaning and
irrationality that cannot be represented, named, or made the object of any sort
of knowledge--what Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus describes as "something
awful,/Fearful and unendurable to see" (182).
The subversion of the concept of the chain of being requires, as Gilson puts it,
that "there take place such events as are the work of freedom and escape neces-
19For discussions of the distinction between the infinite and the unending, see Koyre 8; Wittgenstein
145-46, 218, 229; Lovejoy 66, 112, 116, 117, 123, 125, 127, 138; and Sorabji 198, 210.

13. COMPARATIVELITERATURE/68
sity"(72). But in order to "escape necessity;' a principle of being must be posited
"above being" (i.e., above the chain of being). Gilson calls that principle "exist-
ence," and it is grounded in the unconstrained will of God through which the
creation of the world ex nihilo was effected.2"What is "abovebeing" will not only
not be "intelligible" in an ordinary sense, but might even be said "to not be'.'21
And such an absence is not "relative" Gilson emphasizes (137), is not a priva-
as
tion or lack of presence in the traditionally Catholic, non-mystical sense, but is
rather, in Derrida words, "anabsoluteness of absence" (Limited 7). As Eckhardt,
Inc
from whose writings Heidegger chose the epigraph for his 1915 habilitation on
the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus (Safranski 64), states, "There is in God
neither to be nor being; for, indeed, if a cause is truly a cause, nothing of the
effect should be formally in its cause. Now, God is the cause of all being. Hence
being cannot formally be in God.'22
The sense of the world as a rational, orderly process found in pre-modern
thought is reflected above all in "the principle of sufficient reason" formulated
by Leibniz: "Nothing happens without a reason ... For a thing to be rightly esti-
mated I state as a principle the Harmony of things, that is, the greatest amount
of essence exists that is possible. It follows that there is more reason in the exis-
tence of a thing than in its non-existence. And everything would exist if that
were possible" (92-93). Here the distinctively modern question, "Whyis there
something rather than nothing?" is implied only to be disqualified. For in order
seriously to ask that question, one must first have a concept of nothingness as
distinct and separable from any particular "something'' And it is precisely such a
concept that classical and medieval thinkers for the most part lacked; their use
of the concept of "nothingness" is relative to, and not independent of, "what
is'.'
"Existence"' such pre-modern thinkers, is contained within and subsumed by
for
the necessary and eternal realm of essences that constitute "reality"
III.
I observed above that the term ontologywas coined and became widely used in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to give expression to a new
sense of the "being" of language. Something similar happened with the term
except that rather than a new term being coined an old term was given
aesthetics,
an entirely new sense and meaning. Traditionally, aesthetics had referred to a
kind of sensuous experience that could become the object only of a "confused;'
"indistinct"perception, and thus could never attain the status of genuine knowl-
20 As I have argued elsewhere, Nietzsche's thesis of "the eternal return of the same" stands op-
posed to a Heideggerian account of being quite as much as a Christian one. This is not to imply,
however, that there aren't significant differences between Heideggerian and Christian views; see
Caputo, Hezdegger Aquznas147-84.
and
21 Aristotle, GreaterHzppzas1545, 292e; cf. Parmenedes (129e).
23
22 Qtd. in Gilson 39. For discussion of Eckhardt and his influence on German philosophy, see
Beck 43-45, 59-60, 71-73, 510-11; and Tillich 144, 201-3. On Eckhardt and Heidegger, see Heidegger,
Nzetzsche 220; Caputo, Mystzcal105-12, 129-30, 216-17; and Zimmerman, "Heidegger, Buddhism"
III:
241-42, 250, 258.

14. THE PERFORMATIVEBASIS/69
edge, which from Descartes and Locke through Hume and Kant's first Critique
had been viewed as the product of perception that was intellectually pure, with-
out sensory components""23 The two changes were, indeed, interdependent, for
both conferred on the sensuous features of artistic representation an autonomy
and epistemological legitimacy or seriousness that they had lacked prior to the
eighteenth century. Only by transposing a creationist account of the cosmos onto
the realm of art could the work itself, as a distinct mode of being, be granted the
independence and autonomy required by modern modes of criticism, whether
philological, hermeneutical, New Critical, or poststructuralist. Whereas art, for
Dante, was "the grandchild of God" (InfernoXI: 104) and thus grounded in, as
well as subordinate to, metaphysics, for romanticists such as Friedrich Schlegel
the artist supplants the functions of God-"as God is to his creation, so is the
artist to his own" (qtd. in Lussky 78)-and so provides his creation with its own
ontological status.
Descartes's reduction of the properties of matter to the lowest common de-
nominator of "extension" as well as his replacement of the metaphysical concept
of ousia or essence with that of "knowable object:' had given the domain of sen-
sory experience a "solidity" and self-identity it had lacked in classical times.24
None-
theless, as I have noted, it was Alexander Baumgarten, a rationalist philosopher
of the Leibnizian-Wolffian school, who first treated aesthetic experience as a radi-
cally different kind of cognition, which Baumgarten called "sensate cognition'.'25
To the ancients Baumgarten's phrase would likely have seemed incoherent, since
sensory experience existed too far down on "the chain of being"' and was too
23 On the sensory, "confused" nature of the aesthetic response in Leibniz, Hutcheson, Addison,
Burke, Hume, and others see Guyer, Experience Freedom 62, 65, 81; Thomas 166; Ross, "Beauty"
of 60,
237-41; Mackie 387-96; and Furniss.
24 In ThePrnczplesof Phzlosophy Descartes argues that "the nature of the body consists not in weight,
hardness, color, and the like, but in extension alone" (Method,Medztatzons Phzlosophy
and 335). See
also Marion 114; Kenny 203-4; and Ariew 65. A large part of the appeal of Descartes's dualism of
mind and matter was, as John Cottingham says, that "The theologians could now be offered a
metaphysic in which consciousness was a suzgenens phenomenon, wholly detached from corporeal
events of any kind" (240-41).
25 In his Aesthetzc
Benedetto Croce specifically disputes the revolutionary nature of Baumgarten's
notion of sensate cognition: "criticsattribute to Baumgarten a merit he cannot claim ... According
to them, he effected a revolution by converting Leibniz's differences of degree or quantitative dis-
tinctions into a specific difference, and turning confused knowledge into something no longer
negative but positive by attributing a 'perfectio' to sensitive cognition qua talis; and by thus destroy-
ing the unity of the Leibnitian monad and breaking up the law of continuity, founded the science of
Aesthetic. Had he really accomplished such a giant stride, his claim to the title of 'father of Aes-
thetic' would have been placed beyond question" (214). R.G. Collingwood, strongly influenced by
Croce, does not even mention Baumgarten in his ThePrinciplesof Art. But the arguments of Croce,
who is concerned to establish the priority of Vico in this regard, do not seem to me very convincing,
and in any case Croce acknowledges that in the work of Baumgarten's "disciples"-including Meier,
Mendelssohn, and Herder-just such a break with tradition was eventually carried out (212-19, 242-
56). Rene Wellek is somewhat more positive regarding Baumgarten's role: "Baumgarten, however,
has not only the merit of inventing an important term More definitely than anybody before him
with the possible exception of Vico, he distinguished the realm of art from the realms of philoso-
phy, morality, and pleasure... Art and poetry are 'cognition' but not thought; they are nonintellec-
tual knowledge, 'perception'" (Later EzghteenthCentury 145). Or, as Paul Oskar Kristeller says,
"Baumgarten is the founder of aesthetics insofar as he first conceived a general theory of the arts as
a separate philosophical discipline with a distinctive and well-defined place in the system of philoso-
phy" (425). See also Cassirer 338-60.

15. COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
/70
much like a chaos of particulars incapable of being put into rational order, to be
genuinely cognitivized. By comparison with knowledge that was "clear and dis-
tinct"'a knowledge modeled on mathematics, it "lacked reality"'although this
lack was a matter of degrees or of graded differences, however vast the propor-
tions such differences might entail. The assumption behind this scheme was that
"knowing"was proportionate to "being'.'It is not that our senses "deceive" us;
rather, it is that the data that they present to us is incapable of being cognitivized.
Plato, for example, argues that art is representational or mimetic in that its con-
tent, the "reality" seeks to reflect, is the same reality that governs our ordinary
it
lives. However, due to its sensuous form it is a lower degree of that reality. For
Plato, the disorder, even "madness, of a total immersion in sensory experience
cannot be overcome in art because the poet, is required to submit himself to, not
control, his Muse. Aristotle, more typically Greek than Plato in this respect, is
less able to imagine a world without poets than was Plato in TheRepublicand so
gives art a more respectable status, emphasizing that "poetry is more philosophi-
cal than history," because it deals with universals, as well as particulars. But the
compliment is back-handed: although Aristotle, unlike Plato, welcomes the sen-
sual delight that the experience of art can bring, he nevertheless agrees that
such experiences do not lead to much in the way of knowledge. The experience
of art, being grounded in the senses, cannot be disinterested or "objective"26
That is why Aristotle found music a more essential form of mimesis than paint-
ing: in his view it possessed a greater capacity than other forms of techneor art to
imitate directly, and by imitating to unify, the patterns and flows of sensuous and
intellectual experience (Politics1309-16).
For modern thinkers such as Schopenhauer, however, music, viewed now not
as a technebut as a gateway into a region of rarefied experience that only aesthet-
ics can represent, is privileged for exactly the opposite reason-for its ability to
dramatize the absolute irreconcilability of intellectual and sensuous experience,
of the noumenal and phenomenal spheres of reality.As Schopenhauer says, "The
inexpressible depth of music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise
quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so
inexplicable, is due to the fact that it produces all the emotions of our innermost
being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.., .music [is] the
copy of an original that can itself never be directly represented" (1:264, 257; see
also I:154, 256, 321; 11:404-32,447-62; and Magee 117-88, 240-41, 351-402).
This rarefied conception of the functions of music reflects a more general
feature of the modern sensibility: that sensuous and intellectual experience are
bifurcated and not linked, necessarily, by any unifying context. Sensuous experi-
ence, that is, is not a form of cognition-however "unclear"and "indistinct"-at
all, but rather the "unknowing"-and in Kant's notion of the "Sensibility," the
unknown and unknowable-basis for cognition (PureReason42, 56; see also Guyer,
Claims13-16, 388-90).
26Aristotle, De Poetzca1464, 1451-56; Metaphyszcs
689. "'Knowing' is a matter of language, of stat-
conflationof what
ing; it is not a 'havingof sensations'or 'sense data'"(Randall7). ForAristotle's
we todayregardas the separateprovincesof epistemologyand ontology,see Categorzes and Meta-
35;
physzcs 713-15,729, 732, 735, 747, 776, 782.

16. THE PERFORMATIVE
BASIS/71
By insisting that there is a domain of experience centered in the sensory world
that could not be simply dismissed as "lacking in reality,"Baumgarten helped to
give that domain an autonomy that allowed it to be thought of as qualitatively
different from, and eventually set in binary opposition to, intellectual experi-
ence. The essential and unbridgeable gulf between intellectual and sensuous
experience thus consisted in the fact that while the former, so long as it was
"clear and distinct,' gave us real knowledge, the latter was a "substratum" that did
not "give" knowledge but rather served as the unknowable basis for all knowl-
us
edge. Art could thus be granted a privileged ontological status, but at the cost of
being defined in opposition to a distinct mode of "knowing"' episteme, associ-
or
ated with modern science.
Baumgarten's understanding of aesthetics as sensuous cognition was thus radi-
cally innovative, an innovation whose specifically philosophical consequences
were developed in the work of Condillac, Rousseau, Diderot, and Herder, but
not fully realized until the publication of Kant's Critiqueof Judgmentin 1791, a
work that provided, in Dieter Henrich's words, "tools for establishing the aes-
thetic attitude as self-contained and autonomous, thus as the foundation for a
conception of art that envisages art as a primordial way of being related to and
situated within our world" (30). In the Critiqueof Pure Reason, Kant in essence
establishes the basis of modern epistemology, asserting that "existence is not a
predicate" and therefore that "knowing"what something is does not necessarily
imply that it is; it might be a mere "possibility"that lacks reality or existence. In
Locke's terms, just because we have "ideas"does not mean that they correspond,
or "conform"to, objects external to and independent of those ideas. This pos-
sible lack of correspondence is reflected in Kant's distinction between a purely
possible realm of logical (analytic, synthetic) truth and a demonstrably actual
realm of empirical (a posteriori, priori) truth. What that purely possible realm of
a
logical truth is predicated on, however, cannot be accounted for within experi-
ence, even if it "arises" from experience. Its basis is noumenal, or phenomenally
unknowable, a function of the instruments of perception, which Kant character-
izes in terms of consciousness rather than of language, by means of which our
access to reality is mediated. To highlight such unknowability, Kant terms such a
basis "the thing-in-itself" (PureReason B307)-a thing not "for us;'in Hegel's ter-
minology, but concealed, as though behind a veil, from us. Although for Kant
"the concept of a noumenon is a merely limiting concept, the function of which
is to curb the pretensions of sensibility" (B312), in later thinkers such a concept
prompts the "abysmal" thought that there is in fact nothing behind the veil.
For moderns, then, art is no longer a techne,or practical, sensuous activity,
whose purpose is didactic and moral. Rather, it is a form of reflection, a sort of
performative meditation, on the finitude of human being. That meditation at
once penetrates to the heart of the human essence and "elevates [erhebt]our
imagination, [making] it exhibit those cases where the mind can come to feel its
own sublimity:' a sublimity that, like Heidegger's anxiety toward death, can be
experienced only when the mind is "elevated above any fear of... natural ef-
fects" (Kant, CritiqueofJudgment 121, 123). This notion that art is grounded in
the mind's activity of self-reflection, an activity exhibited above all in the arbi-

17. COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
/72
trary and "created"nature of literary language, proves decisive for the aesthetic
theories of Schelling, Schiller, and Hegel, all of whom image the aesthetic expe-
rience in terms of a dialectical interplay of being and nothingness, however dif-
ferent the roles given to aesthetic experience in their thought as a whole.
Modern aesthetics arises not by competing directly with the other sciences but
by constituting itself in its own separate and autonomous sphere. But in order
for this modern constitution of aesthetics to occur, there must have occurred
first a revolution in our view of the objects of the sensory world. That world
needed first to be rationalized, intellectualized, in a way made possible by mod-
ern science. Once having gained a uniformity and predictability, a regularity and
consistency that is assumed by Kant in his description of the a priori intuitions of
space and time, the confused nature of art's subject matter could gain a status
which, although still confused (indistinct), was clear: art could impose its own
special kind of logic on the senses, a logic concerned with particulars and ex-
amples rather than rules and maxims, a logic which in Leibniz and Baumgarten
could achieve a higher dignity than that given to it by the Greeks.7 Such logic
produced a kind of knowledge that did not equal or rival that of the other
sciences but which nonetheless was of indirect relevance to the real world: that
is, its relevance was not in terms of truth, but in terms of beauty. The experience
of beauty could thus be made disinterested: it could be given a cognitive status
subordinate to that of the sciences (Baumgarten) and then be freed, in the
romantics, from the need to masquerade as something cognitive altogether,
asserting its importance on entirely different grounds, in order not merely to
compete with the sciences in importance but to assert its superiority.
Kant's "dualism',' then, although still largely "classical"or constrained, is the
'jumping-off" place for the development, in the thought of such idealists as
Schelling and Hegel, of a qualitatively different kind of dualism based on binary
opposition and made possible by the elimination of "the thing in itself" or un-
knowable realm of noumena. The latter dualism is at once more radical and
more subtle than Kant's, since it makes room for the potential collapse, para-
doxically, of all oppositions. It is through such a collapse, or "universalization" of
the Kantian antinomies, that the way is prepared for a modern ontology of re-
flection, or absence, that does not merely limit and simultaneously preserve the
authority of science by skeptically critiquing its empiricist basis, as Kant did, but
instead subordinates the analytical logic of science (based on the law of non-
contradiction) to a dialectical logic that is linked, in Schiller and Schelling, to
aesthetic and religious experience, which is identified, in Hegel, with the unfold-
ing of the Concept throughout history; and which characterizes, in Heidegger
and Derrida, the "being"of language itself. It is a logic, in all cases, that affirms
the most extreme, non-rationalist (but not necessarily irrationalist) implication
of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo-the implication that God's essence is wholly
distinct from and independent of created existence-except that in place of the
entirely free and arbitrarywill of God, dialectics substitutes an autonomous logi-
27For a discussion of the independence of the notions of "clarity" and "distinctness" in
helpful
relation to aesthetic objects, see Norton 30-33.

18. THE PERFORMATIVE
BASIS/73
cal mechanism fueled by historical processes that has "itsotherness within itself,"
as Hegel says in the Phenomenology Spirit (34). The logic of deconstruction,
of
although fueled by arbitrary linguistic oppositions rather than historical pro-
cesses, similarly contains its "otherness"within itself in so far as its very identity is
stipulated as dependent on such otherness.
The valorization of written language characteristic of modern ontology is "un-
derwritten" by a modern "existentialism"in Gilson's sense, which presupposes a
binary opposition between sensuous and intellectual experience exemplified in
its most radical form in the non-naturalistic tradition of German philosophy.
Organicist theories of language and the modern semiotic view of the arbitrary
nature of the sign both arise out of the aesthetic tradition fostered by German
romanticism and idealism. But that tradition itself cannot be seen in isolation
from the rise of modern science. For it is only modern empiricism's reduction of
the classically "mimetic"view of language to a view of language as referring refer-
entially to objects outside itself that it becomes possible to take the further step
of viewing language as anti-mimetic or representative of nothing-I mean Nothing
-outside itself. The pre-modern metaphysics of presence, as opposed to the
modern ontology of reflection or absence, does not have an empirical basis. Al-
though classical mimesis adopts a "correpondence theory of truth;' the corre-
spondence postulated is between model or archetype (Idea) on the one hand
and object or "thing" on the other hand. The latter object is conceived as so
unclear and indistinct that it is virtually without knowable properties and there-
fore utterly dependent, in its "being,' on the Idea. In order for "meaning" or a
logically based notion of truth to arise, the independence and autonomy of its
counter-concept, the empirical, had to be established-an independence and
autonomy that no classical conception of eidoscould provide since the latter was
never seen as a feature of a subjectivity and capacity for reflection intrinsic to the
human species. It was indeed the genius of German idealism to found the doctrine
of the arbitrary nature of language on a basis at once universal and contextually
independent so that it could be governed by a logic that was "other"to nature,
yet a logic that was organicist-an organicity possessed of a "second"' distinctively
human and reflective, "nature"In this way post-Kantian idealism transcends the
limitations stipulated by Kant on knowledge of being through methods based on
the self-limiting character of language. Homotextilisresults from the narrativization
of life within the boundaries of the text, such that life's highest moments are
captured, realized, and made possible by words positing a life, or being of the
text, that leaves behind any mere equation of life and words.
University Oklahoma
of
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