Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (review)

In Greek legend, the sons of the Seven Against Thebes repeated their fathers’ failed attack ten years later, eventually succeeding in capturing Thebes. In other words, the original epigones—belated, repetitive, and secondary—were successful. Far from representing a “less distinguished follower or imitator,” as the OED would have it, being born after—a translation of the Greek epigonos—constitutes a state of afterness, which scrambles conventional notions of originality, succession, and progress.

Gerhard Richter’s Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics presents a series of essays on the experience of specific atemporality in modernity, mainly through the works of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Breaking with traditional notions of progression, linearity, and teleology, Richter’s neologism “afterness” “denotes a rhetorical, intellectual, and experiential phenomenon that emerges from our understanding of lateness, supersession, and posteriority” (9). For Richter, coming after should not be misunderstood as merely derivative, belated, or secondary. Instead, he convincingly argues for the recognition of an “essential” anachronism inherent in any thought that authentically attempts to understand time and history.

The strongest and most convincing passages of Afterness are those in which Richter offers often surprising and insightful readings of canonical texts in the tradition of Critical Theory and its afterlife. A good example of this is his interpretation of the subtle dialectics in Bertolt Brecht’s notion of crude thinking, as mobilized by Walter Benjamin. Surprisingly—especially since Richter’s readings are nothing less than subtle and refined—it is a specific form of crudeness (a translation of the German plump) in thinking, which dialectically brings theory and praxis into a productive constellation.

Another example of Richter’s intricate and illuminating interpretations is an astute unfolding of the last piece of Adorno’s Minima Moralia entitled “Zum Ende,” which so far—as Richter points out—has not yet been made the topic of any sustained theoretical engagement. Starting with an analysis of the little word zum, its meaning oscillating between “toward,” “on the occasion of,” and “with regard to,” Richter develops an enlightening notion of an “end without end.” It is in these instances that Richter convincingly connects lucid close readings of particular passages with larger issues of aesthetics, political theory, and philosophy.

Richter insists on the ethicopolitical dimensions of being in a state of afterness. This engagement with the praxis of theory manifests itself, for example, in various reflections on the status of the humanities in the environment of the contemporary university. In this sense, Afterness, in its crude subtlety, needs to be read both as a much-needed intervention in the realm of theory, after the so-called end of theory, and its concrete institutionalization and practice. For Richter, theory has always been in the peculiar state of an “end without end,” always pointing beyond itself, resisting closure or completion. Hence all triumphant gestures of having overcome or having moved beyond it miss the crucial element of afterness, which permeates all contemporary practices of textual analysis.

Afterness should not be read as the final but as a next-to-last word. A word that does not close or complete, but that instead invites one to follow, to recognize afterness not as a failure or a deficiency. Hence it might be read—in Jean Francois Lyotard’s sense—as a philosophy after philosophy that has been altered by the after.