Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic

Notes

Preface 1. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 272. I am indebted to Ed Pluth for certain clarifications of the distinction between the passage à l’acte and the act tout court. 2. Certain of Slavoj Z+iz=ek’s formulations seem to imply this kind of ethical trajectory . See, for example, the final chapter, “The Breakout,” in The Fragile Absolute or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 143–60. 3. See, for example, the issue of Umbr(a): Science and Truth (2000). 4. Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, IV: Either/Or Part II, vol. 2, ed., trans., intro. and notes Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987), 219. 5. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. and ed. James Strachey, intro. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 92. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. and notes Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 216–17. Chapter 1 1. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Robert D. Bamberg, Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1995), 360. Further references in the text as PL. See Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: CUP, 1962). 2. Lawrence Buell, “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics,” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 7–19, p. 7. 3. My debts to these latter two should be evident throughout. 4. Jonathan Freedman, “James, Pater, and the Dreaming of Aestheticism,” Isabel Archer, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1992), 152–63. 5. The phrase is from Bersani. See Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990). 147 Notes 6. Emmanuel Levinas is an important philosophical resource for this contemporary “revival” of ethics, but so-called political readers of Derrida such as Christopher Norris must also be considered part of this attempt to shift the terms of deconstruction toward political and ethical questions, a concern that has already occupied J. Hillis Miller for many years. More recent theorists of ethics in literary studies include Adam Zachary Newton , Narrative Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995); Tobin Siebers, The Subject and Other Subjects: On Ethical, Aesthetic, and Political Identity (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998) and Alan Singer, The Subject as Action: Transformation and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993). 7. Laurel Brake notes the general enthusiasm for German theology, philosophy and letters in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. See Laurel Brake, Walter Pater (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), 17–18. 8. For a discussion of Isabel’s perceptual blindness, see Mary Cross, Henry James: The Contingencies of Style (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1993), 63. Moody, on the other hand, accuses Isabel of a deliberate moral blindness. See A. D. Moody, “James’s Portrait of an Ideal,” The Magic Circle of Henry James: Essays in Honour of Darshan Singh Maini, ed. Amritjit Singh and K. Ayyappa Paniker (New York: Envoy P, 1989), 21–40, p. 25. 9. Elizabeth Sabiston, “Isabel Archer: The Architecture of Consciousness and the International Theme,” The Henry James Review 7 (1986): 29–47. 10. John H. Smith, The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988), 30–31. 11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. T. K. Abbott (New York: Prometheus Books, 1996), 116. Henceforth cited in the text as CPrR. 12. For a more detailed discussion of this ironic solution, see Singer, 141–43. 13. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973), 34. 14. Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P, 1983), 218. 15. Dorothy Berkson, “Why Does She Marry Osmond? The Education of Isabel Archer,” American Transcendental Quarterly 60 (1986): 53–71. 16. Donatella Izzo, “The Portrait of a Lady and Modern Narrative,” New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: CUP, 1990), 33–48, p. 37. 17. Carol Vopat, “Becoming a Lady: The Origins and Development of Isabel Archer’s Ideal Self,” Literature and Psychology 38 (1992): 38–56, p. 43. 18. Berkson, 59. 19. Paul B. Armstrong, “Freedom and Necessity: The Servile Will and The Portrait of a Lady,” in The Phenomenology of Henry James (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983), 99–135. 20. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute...