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

In the course of his consequential Cerisy lecture on what it means to fall under the gaze of the non-human animal, and thus to live and think in the midst of its inexorable precedence, Jacques Derrida asks “‘What does ‘to be after’ mean?’” (ctd by Richter 208). Every answer to that impossible question will have come too early and too late, but it is precisely the strange chiasmus of being-behind and being-before that quickens Gerhard Richter’s rigorously argued book about what he calls “afterness.” “Nachheit” is the lure to thought whose uncertain traces Richter follows through the twists and turns of an enormously suggestive archive, ranging from the work of Kant to Derrida, and from the intricacies of Hölderlin’s poems to the mise en abyme of Stefan Moses’s photographic portraits. Insistent and disruptive, while also weightless and inexpressive, Nachheit, if there is such a thing, proves to be remarkably slippery to apprehend. Its recessiveness is precisely what activates Richter’s analyses, which respond with exemplary hospitality to the myriad ways in which “certain key principles of afterness … haunt us always one more time” (21). As Richter’s engaged and engaging discussions demonstrate, afterness is neither the condition nor expectation of an end, much less a “dead end,” nor a feeling of psychic or cultural exhaustion, nor an existential state of belatedness or Geworfenheit or Nachträglichkeit, although none of these phenomena and philosophemes is unrelated to afterness or indemnified against its unsettling powers. Richter spends relatively little time speaking of afterness in the abstract because whatever it is, it is a fluid and emergent form, a murmuration in the discourses of modernity whose gathering legibility is always ever more about to be. Afterness is therefore not one subject of scholarly theoria among many, because it redounds unexpectedly and irrepressively on the labor of the theorist. Among the many strengths of Richter’s book is the degree to which it involves itself, down to the level of the syntax of its sentences and the pacing of its paragraphs and chapters, in afterness’s generative conundrum: because we come after afterness, every thought about afterness is also always a thought of afterness. Richter’s critique is therefore nothing if not radically immanent; framed by the problem it frames, Richter’s quarry compels the thinker to become, as it were, a figure who dwells tardily amid the “tropes, situations, and media” that form the archive of his own text. As Richter says in his introductory comments, “this study will not presuppose the after as a known category about which one could simply write a history.” “Here … the after will be kept open–that is, will be shown always to have kept itself open–as the site of competing significations and claims that have the capacity to surprise us in their idiomatic singularity and their refusal to be absorbed without remainder into the master narratives, valuable and reassuring as they are, of causal and linear unfolding” (21).

Richter’s deixis—“Here”—is telling. It reminds us that, strictly speaking, “the concept of afterness as a privileged trope and experiential category of modernity” is legible only in its particular “iterations and modulations” (21). Richter’s book is a critical practice in which afterness is not so much the subject of analysis as a discursive location in which it makes its spectral presence felt. To be true to the spirit of the book, a review must stay close to that practice, focussing resolutely on “the idiomatic singularity” of its readings, findings, and soundings. Let me thus point briefly to four instances of what it means–after Richter–to dwell with the thought of afterness: Adorno’s aesthetic practice, Moses’ photographs, Heidegger’s translational thinking; and the university’s stake in “educated hope.”

Citing Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the late Roger Simon argued that “For the sake of the possible, one must comprehend the impossibility of redemptive thought from the standpoint...