Borders of a Lip: Romanticism, Language, History, Politics (review)

As the subtitle indicates, this is an ambitious and wide-ranging book. It is not exactly a sign of hubris, given that in some sense the huge categories of the subtitle might well be - or even should be - at work or at play in any sustained critical project dealing with Romanticism. Jan Plug's study, which takes the figure of the lip as its point of departure and organizing principle, is welcome in its comparative framework. Its time-honoured juxtaposition of British and German materials is productive in this period, given the intellectual traffic between the two nations and their common fate as witnesses of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars unfolding next door and sometimes spilling over into their own domains. The lip, as the site where speech passes from inside to outside (even if the opposition between the two is tenuous), is a particularly resonant figure for texts that engage language and borders in charged ways.

The book features chapters on Kant, Wordsworth, Kleist, Mary Shelley, and Yeats. The jump to Yeats is striking, even if he did consider himself the last of the Romantics and was a serious reader of Blake and Shelley. But it turns out that Yeats's national(ist) concerns, articulated via myth and poetry, bear something of a resemblance to the problematics elaborated by the Romantics.

There is a good deal of labour and intelligence on display in this book. The chapter on Wordsworth, focusing on his 'Poems on the Naming of Places,' is particularly convincing. Plug takes up, among other things, the permanently interesting, even bizarre, practice of Wordsworth's almost singular ways of classifying his poems. Plug's attentiveness to speech-act theory and the general critique of representation in poststructuralist thinking helps get at important aspects of Wordsworth's project - naming as positing rather than representing - which have ripple effects for thinking about a good of Wordsworth more generally. And the chapter on Mary Shelley's The Last Man - surely one of the best readings of the text to date - is very suggestive in its analysis of the odd temporality and the rhetoric of address in Shelley's strange and not so successful but still fascinating novel.

In such an ambitious undertaking, it's hardly a surprise if not everything lives up to the big promise, and it so happens that I think the argument falters on the question of the promise. Following Lyotard's reading of Kant, Plug wants to think about the 'political,' which is not to be confused with mere or sheer politics. Thus, somewhat in the manner of de Man's great essay on Rousseau's Social Contract, Plug wants to articulate the political as the condition of possibility of politics. But in arguing, for example, about the bad faith of the promise at a transcendental or quasi-transcendental level (almost only because a promise could always not be fulfilled) Plug unduly imports a category (bad faith) that only makes sense in actual politics - where it is, as we know, so lamentably common. There is, as far as I can tell, no such thing as transcendental or structural bad faith. This might be a small symptom of the difficulty in trying to articulate the now famously unwritten (by Kant) Critique of Political Reason. Perhaps the absence of such a critique was a sign of Kant's prudence?

And the drive to read literary texts as either philosophical allegories or repositories of philosophical insight (they can often be either or both) sometimes produces odd results, as in the section on Kleist's Der Zerbrochene Krug, a chapter which is almost indifferent to the fact that the play is a comedy - a fact that might temper the philosophical-political conclusions one is drawing from it.

Thus one of the few downsides to this book is its rather relentless drive to theorizing, to operating at the level of thinking 'the political,' which then does not always pay off in...